Ecology Across Borders: a 2-voice account

First big conference experience for a rookie PhD student

In the mid of December 2017, I attended the Ecology Across Borders meeting (organised by the BES, GfÖ, necov and eef) at Ghent: a home match! Terec’s offices and labs were literally right across the street. The week kick-started with a snowstorm.

To be clear: this is not normal in Belgium, not at all…

Below I will outline great contributions that will directly help my research, talks that impressed me, some random conference fun and how my poster went.

The super-useful stuff for my own research:

On Monday, there were pre-conference workshops. I attended the one about IBMs: Individual Based Models (construction, calibration and evaluation). The workshop was organised by the group of Richard Sibly from Reading. I am currently working on an IBM and this workshop gave me a lot of useful insights in how to practically proceed with my analysis. They also succeeded in giving a nice overview of the complete framework and different steps and possibilities of IBM development, in quite a restricted timeframe. Many thanks to the people from Reading!

The talks that sticked to my mind

During the parallel sessions, I was impressed by the talk of Pedro Bergamo, who also won an early career prize. He talked about hummingbird-pollinated flowers, which are frequently red coloured. His research showed that red flowers rather avoid visits of bees than attract hummingbirds. It was a very detailed study and when he mentioned during the questions that this was his bachelor’s project, I was really impressed.
The last plenary talk, by Iain Couzin from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, nailed me to my chair. He talked about his amazing experiments and technology driven research about collective behaviour. Top papers followed each other smoothly building around his visionary ideas. It often felt like an inspirational TED-talk.

Other fun parts

I attended the Science slam with a bunch of colleagues. It was great fun and laughter! The comedy was of a high standard, with a lot of recognisable situations and jokes brought by your next-door ecologist.
I was also a helper at the meeting, which meant I was wearing one of those blue t-shirts with ‘help is here’. We had to stand at the welcoming desk, make sure parallel sessions went smoothly etc. There were a lot of helpers and there wasn’t always that much to do, but this is a good thing of course: it shows that the meeting progressed smoothly.

My own poster

The poster sessions were really big and crowded. I also presented my own poster about my Master project. It was good to learn what you can make more coherent and attractive when you explain your research in a few sentences to other scientists. It was great to exchange ideas and receive tips and tricks and contact details of interested people!

The (very British) meeting was overwhelming: there is so much to do in so little time (13 parallel sessions and workshops during lunch)! So you always had the feeling you missed out on a lot of interesting talks. After the conference I was really tired but satisfied. There was a nice atmosphere during the meeting that motivated sharing ideas and talk to scientists whose names are familiar from papers you’ve read.

Joint ecological meeting rocks! Thoughts on EAB from a PostDoc in transition

Lionel Hertzog

As the (scientific) excitement of the joint meeting of the British, German and Dutch ecological society is slowly fading away, I’d like to put down my impressions and thoughts derived from this big conference.

General thoughts

The conference, named Ecology Across Borders, was super intense. It started for me on Sunday with a side event on dispersal organized by Dries Bonte. Apparently this happy group of people has been meeting for quite some time and you could feel it. On Monday, I took part in the Hackathon workshop, the topic I chose was on writing a package to simulate new response values from a fitted model. I’ve learned quite a lot about general code organization, creating packages and collaborating on a computing project. Monday was also THE snow chaos day, I usually have a nice 30min bike to get home, that evening it took me one and an half hour! The real conference lasted from Tuesday until Thursday packed with 13 parallel sessions, many friends and colleagues joining, so these were buzzing days. The contributions were in general very interesting and everything ran smoothly thanks to a great bunch of helpers (thanks Femke 🙂 ). I really liked the motto of this conference (Ecology Across Borders), I hope that more and more of these joint conferences will take place as it really promote exchange of ideas with people you would not otherwise meet. The social events were also great fun. On Tuesday, I joined the computational ecology mixers, I chatted with few people but due to limited food supply I packed my stuff and went to a nearby sushi restaurant. The party on Wednesday evening was also great fun, it is always cool to see all these serious ecologists loosen up and collectively vibrate on some cool music.

Talks that sticked to my mind

On the dispersal event on Sunday, the talk of Lucas Borger was very inspiring, since then I am interested in Hidden Markov Models to fit to telemetry data, as a long-time lover of spatial data I am always interested in learning about new models. Also interesting during his talk was the observation that young great albatross circle several times around the antarctic but once adults they settle and never show this behavior again. Another talk that impressed me was the one by Sonia Kéfi in the simulation topic session were she talked about the theoretical and statistical challenges of detecting early warning signals of systems entering catastrophic stages. Finally, I rushed on Thursday to see Carsten Dormann’s talks on model averaging which emphasize that there is no best method of model averaging, the best way is when model weights are known a-priori which is almost never the case. So if the interest of an analysis is to better understand some system, model averaging are best left out.

My little contributions

I had two contributions to the EAB meeting, (i) one workshop on using Stan for Bayesian Data Analysis together with Maxime Dahirel and (ii) a poster on optimizing the derivation of landscape resistance to derive patch connectivity. The workshop was a bit of a challenge, we had no idea on the background of the people that would turn out, we were supposed to make it as interactive as possible, and we had 90min for packing all Bayesian fun we could think of. Thanks to some training and some feedback from colleagues on Stan developers, the session went pretty well. Albeit with some tricky part especially in explaining priors and the different practice in Bayesian Data Analysis. I also had a poster showing some work in progress on a very actual question: how to derive connectivity measures between habitat patches for a large number of species? Variants of circuit theory which attribute resistance values landscape features are very promising but require a proper method to set these resistance values a priori. This is what we are trying to do right now by using community divergence as a signal of landscape resistance. Check out the poster for more infos and stay tuned for info on that side.