Workshops

Workshops

Sunday 11 December

We are delighted to have our early careers workshop return after lasts years success, and add our new coding workshop to our pre-Annual Meeting offering. Please note these have a minimal charge and must be booked when you register.

Early Careers Workshop
09:00 – 16:30
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL – PLEASE CONTACT KATE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

The Early Career Workshop is back with another jam-packed programme. We are bringing together leading ecologists and practitioners who will cover all things from career-planning, to publishing, and grant writing.

The workshop will kick off on Sunday 11 with members of the Education, Training, and Careers Committee sharing tips on how to raise your profile and making the most of the Annual Meeting experience. This will be followed by the ‘Unlocking your potential’ Q&A panel with senior ecologists including our current president Sue Hartley, BES council members and editors. The afternoon will focus on how to move from PhD to post-doc, or post-doc to permanent contract, and how to get  your work published. We have also planned a session on communicating effectively from CV to interview, as well as how to stay employable whilst in and out of academia. On Sunday evening we have organised an ECR social mixer bringing together members of the BES Early Careers Working Group and Special Interest Group representatives, which will serve as a great networking opportunity too!

We will be holding sessions throughout the meeting that includes an opportunity to meet the plenary speakers, explore your career options outside academia, find out how to manage an interdisciplinary career and hear highlights from our ECR grant writing workshop.

Refreshments and lunch will be provided.  You can download the programme here

Best Practice for Code Archiving
12:00 – 17:00
£10

Interested in how to distribute and archive code? Join Methods in Ecology and Evolution Editor Rob Freckleton, along with several experts with backgrounds in programming and ecology to provide practical discussion of writing and sharing code for your research. All levels of expertise are welcome, especially those just starting out.

The workshop will be introduced by Natalie Cooper who will explain why reproducible code is important and give an overview of the rest of the workshop. We will then have three breakout sessions giving participants practical training in best practice for using code in ecology research. We will focus on quality, functionality, robustness and usability. Breakout groups will be led by code experts Mike Croucher, Laura Graham and Tamora James.

Finally, participants will have the opportunity to input into the development of new guidelines for archiving code for publication, which are currently being developed by the BES journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Journal Editor Rob Freckleton will introduce the new guidelines and lead a discussion on how they can best serve the community.

Don’t miss out – book on when you register for our Annual Meeting. Earlybird deadline is 21 October so get in quick!

Please contact Emilie Aime if you have any questions

Lunch will be available from midday and tea and coffee will be provided.

Programmed Workshops

We are delighted again to offer workshops within our Annual Meeting schedule! These are free to attend, and happen over lunchtime on Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 December. You can take your lunch with you  as well – there will be a special catering point on the mezzanine for those attending workshops to grab a takeway box.

MONDAY:

Making Brexit work for ecology and the environment
BES Policy team

How can citizen science data better support decision makers?
Ian Thornhill, Earthwatch Institute

Macro-ecology through the lens of comparative demography
Robert Salguero-Gómez, University of Sheffield

Improving the reproducibility of data analysis with R Markdown
Aline Quadros, Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology, Bremen, Germany

Engaging with the Press and measuring impact
BES External Affairs team

A spotlight on the publishing process: how to review papers and get your own published.
Ellen Fry, Manchester University

Managing Stress: how to identify the signs and learn techniques to manage them
Bernadette Lynch, Mind

TUESDAY:

The construction, calibration and evaluation of Individual Based Models (IBMs)
Richard Sibly, Reading University

Wikithon: Quantitative Ecology Documentation (QED)
Dominic Bennett, Institute of Zoology, London

Leadership skills for early career researchers
Owen Petchey, University of Zurich

Enhancing ecological fieldwork with Virtual Reality.
Steve Tilling, Field Studies Council and Phil Wheeler, Open University

Careers in Conservation Student Workshop
Stuart Patterson, Conservation SIG

What is the future of peer review in ecology?
BES Publications Team