Interested in attending a workshop? Check out these descriptions and then sign up using the link at the bottom of the page. There is no fee associated with any of these workshops.
1. Editor’s workshop: Focusing on peer-reviews. Led by Mark Hauber (Editor of The Auk: Ornithological Advances) and Philip Stouffer (Editor of The Condor: Ornithological Applications).
This workshop will focus on providing advice to beginning-stage scientists about what, when, and how to peer-review, including specifics about the society’s journals, The Auk: Ornithological Advances and The Condor: Ornithological Applications. The editors-in-chief will discuss the perspectives of the referees, the authors, and the editors in the peer-review process.
Schedule: lunchtime: July 29 – 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Contact: Mark Hauber: mark[dot]hauber[at]hunter[dot]cuny[dot]edu
2. Raising your chicks as an ornithologist. Led by Kim Sullivan.
This interactive, lunchtime workshop is for experienced and new parents as well as those considering parenthood. Ornithologists produce few children compared to other academic disciplines. Many ornithologists cite the difficulties of combining field work with family formation. This workshop will allow participants to share information on what works in combining their professional life with parenting. We will discuss what to say when applying for jobs, negotiating parental leave, child care strategies and resources, field work solutions, and organizing your life to get your work done.
Schedule: Lunchtime July 30 – 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Contact: Kim Sullivan: kim[dot]sullivan[at]usu[dot]edu
3. Careers in ornithology. Led by Nick Mason (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University), Melany Colón (Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences Department, Texas A&M University), and Mike Butler (Department of Biology, Lafayette College).
This workshop will be an open discussion about the opportunities, pitfalls, resources, contacts, havens, and predators that await young ornithologists venturing into the job market. The primary target audience consists of graduate students, recent graduates, and post-docs. However we also welcome the participation of senior ornithologists who are concerned for the future of their discipline and who have some wisdom and/or job offers to impart.
Schedule: Friday, July 31 from 4pm to 5:30.
Contact: Nick Mason nicholas[dot]albert[dot]mason[at]gmail[dot]com
4. Taking R to the next level: Programming, manipulation, and graphing in R. Led by Matt Boone (University of Delaware) and Auriel Fournier (University of Arkansas).
This workshop will help those who already know how to use R gain new skills and allow them to use R more effectively. We will focus on five topics that are not easily selftaught or included in Intro to R courses, but are instead frequently learned through trial and error. Each topic will include a lecture portion, followed by working through problems as a group, discussing the code and answering questions. The topics are:
- Brief refresher and intro to R and it’s base functions (subsetting, apply, etc)
- Data management and manipulation with the ‘reshape’ package
- Graphing and mapping with the ‘ggplot2’ package
- Programming and automation in R
- How to troubleshoot R errors and find help online
The target audience includes Undergraduate and graduate students interested in increasing their R skills, and we are especially interested in helping those who work at institutions where instructional materials for learning R are not readily available. Non-students are also welcome.
Schedule: Tuesday, July 28, 8am to 5pm.
Contact: Auriel Fournier amvander[at]uark[dot]edu
5. Weather radar ornithology 101. Led by Jeff Buler (Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, University of Delaware), Jaci Smolinsky (Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, University of Delaware), Robert Diehl (USGS, Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center), Kyle Horton (Department of Biology, University of Oklahoma), Dan Sheldon (Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts), Andrew Farnsworth (Cornell Lab of Ornithology).
This workshop will provide a primer and basic training for ornithologists to understand, access, visualize, screen, and process weather data from the USA weather radar network using various open source and freely-available custom software (e.g. software developed by University of Delaware, University of Oklahoma, and University of Massachusetts). Participants will learn the basics of identifying biological radar signatures from other sources (i.e. precipitation and clutter) and current approaches for distinguishing birds from insects. Participants will learn and practice data analysis techniques to derive bird flight speed and direction and to adjust for biases in radar measures for mapping bird distributions near the ground and determining bird densities aloft. The goal of the workshop is to leave participants equipped with a better understanding of how to use weather radar as a scientific research tool to answer questions in ornithology. Our target audience includes ornithologists (professionals and students) interested in using weather radar data as part of their research toolkit. Basic familiarity with weather radar is preferred. Note that this workshop will be held in conjunction with a symposium entitled “Recent scientific applications of weather radar for advancing ornithology,” which will be part of the conference’s scientific program.
Schedule: Tuesday, July 28, Workshop 8am to noon; Field trip 1:30pm to 3:30pm.
Maximim number of participants: 20
Contact: Jeff Buler jbuler[at]udel[dot]edu
6. Light-level geolocation with open source tools. Led by Nat Seavy (Point Blue Conservation Science), Simeon Lisovski (Deakin University), Eldar Rakhimberdiev (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research), Jonah Duckles (University of Oklahoma) and Eli Bridge, (University of Oklahoma).
Light-level geolocation has tremendous potential for generating information about bird migration, but the reconstruction of reliable locations from light-level data can be challenging. This workshop will provide participants with hands-on training (ideally using their own data) with several analysis packages within the R environment that can generate locations from light-level data. Participants will compare different approaches to filtering and smoothing their data to understand how these methods work and how they can be used to address a variety of scientific questions. We will begin with simple thresholding methods and accessory analyses (e.g. GeoLight and KFtrack) and progress through some recent, more advanced analysis packages (e.g., SGAT and FlightR). The workshop will enable participants to make the most of their geolocator data and derive not just location estimates but also uncertainty metrics for those estimates. We will also present helpful techniques for assessing migration phenologies, categorizing stationary and migratory periods, and graphcially presenting results.
This two-day workshop will convene the morning of Monday July 27 and will continue throughout the next day. We will begin with an introduction to preliminary tasks such as importing and formatting raw data, manual editing, and initial data visualization. Late arrivals may miss out on these preliminaries and still get a lot out of the workshop, especially if they are advanced R users or have conducted their own geolocator analyses in R.
Schedule: Two-day workshop — Monday July 27 (9am to 5pm) and Tuesday, July 28 (8am to 5pm).
Maximim number of participants: 35
Contact: Nat Seavy nseavy[at]pointblue[dot]org
7. Introduction to R. Led by Nick Mason (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University), Melany Colón (Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences Department, Texas A&M University), and Mike Butler (Department of Biology, Lafayette College).
This workshop is a reprieve of our course offered at Estes-Park in 2014 that introduces attendees to the R programming environment. R is a free, open-source programming tools with an excellent capacity for doing statistics and dealing with unwieldy data sets. The workshop is aimed at students, post-doctoral researchers, and early-career professionals who have little or no experience with R. The main objective will be to confer a basic familiarity and understanding of what R is, what it is capable of, and learning how to perform some basic tasks and functions using rudimentary data structures. Attendees will be asked to bring their own laptops and have R installed prior to attending the workshop. Participants will generate their own code and also follow scripts that have been provided by the instructors.
Topics to be covered are as follows:
- Introduction to R–Brief history/overview of R; Benefits and challenges of learning a programming language; Comparison between R and other programming languages; Overview of capabilities in R; Simple Programming
- Seeking help in R–R help files; CRAN; Stack overflow and other online resources
- Objects in R–Scripting and console windows; Working directories; Data classes: strings, factors, and numerics; Vectors, matrices, data frames, and lists; Reading data into R
- Basic functions in R–Installing and loading packages into R; Indexing/subsetting data; Combining vectors and data matrices; Querying data class and format
- Basic statistics in R–Contingency tables; T-test; Chi-square test; Linear Regression
- Creating simple plots and graphics; Scatterplots; Histograms; Barplots; Phylogenies; Maps
Tuesday, July 28, 8am to 12 noon. Contact: Nick Mason nicholas[dot]albert[dot]mason[at]gmail[dot]com
Where to sign up? Follow this link and fill out the google form: