Lab Ongoings

Katie and I had a wonderful 17-day (!!) trip in Patagonia, as a post-PhD defense celebration for her, and a pre-PhD defense celebration for me. I’ll spare myself writing too many words here, other than to point to the two videos I put together capturing some of the moments from our two main destinations:

Several members of the Scheffers Lab, including myself, headed down to Bonita Springs in South Florida for the 2023 Species on the Move Conference. This was the third conference in this series, and drew about 300 attendees from (by my rough guess) 35 nations or so. The theme of this conference series is exploring how, where, and why species are shifting their spatial distributions due to global change.

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In August 2022, I co-organized a week-long workshop for Madagascar National Parks to develop data management, analysis, and visualization skills, pertaining to the database of vertebrate observations for the 43 terrestrial protected areas across Madagascar. In total there were 37 participants, collectively representing all 43 terrestrial protected areas in Madagascar (some park directorial staff oversee multiple protected areas). The workshop was held in the Ambatobe office headquarters in Antananarivo, Madagascar. The majority of analytical lessons in this workshop were taught in Excel, which was a moderately familiar platform to most workshop attendees, but not fully incorporated or leveraged in data management procedures. Furthermore, prior to the main workshop activities (over five days), we also led two days of focused training on data curation and visualization in R for a smaller group of six participants, and also led an overview and introduction to R for the main workshop group.