Statistical ecology comes of age

Our meeting report on ISEC2014 has appeared in Biology Letters just before Christmas eve, nice gift! Check it out, it’s in open access.

Jim Sedinger's sabbatical

Jim Sedinger, professor at the University of Nevada (Reno), said goodbye to the team after 3 months with us on a sabbatical. It’s been great to have Jim here analyzing data collected as part of the amazing Black Brant monitoring initiated in the 40s.

Sarah Calba's PhD defense

I acted as president of the examining committee of Sarah Calba who defended her PhD in epistemology of sciences with the predictions in community ecology as a case study. The thesis was supervised by two clever colleagues of mine, Virginie Maris and Vincent Devictor.

AppliBugs and applications of Bayesian theory

We held AppliBugs in Montpellier, with the idea to stimulate exchanges and to share information on Bayesian methods and applications ( program here). The day went well despite a rainstorm falling on Montpellier.

Workshop on individual heterogeneity

We had a lovely 2-day workshop in Lyon on individual heterogeneity in demography as part of our research group on Statistical Ecology. I gave a short talk providing an overview of heterogeneous capture-recapture models.

Workshop on citizen science and statistics

After a month off, I’m back to work starting with a 2-day workshop on citizen sciences I’ve co-organised with Romain Julliard and Pascal Monestiez ( program) as part of our group on Statistical Ecology and on citizen sciences CiSStats.

New kids on the Bayesian block

I attended Daniel Turek’s talk at ISEC about NIMBLE a neat alternative to WinBUGS and JAGS. It is developed by Perry de Valpine’s group at Berkeley and ‘lets you use BUGS models natively in R, program functions that use them, and compile everything via C++ for faster computing’.

ISEC 2014: the end

ISEC 2014 is now closed. Organising this conference has been a fantastic adventure; hopefully the participants liked it.

We're presenting our work at ISEC 2014

I gave a talk at ISEC 2014 on fitting occupancy models with hidden-Markov models using E-SURGE:

Economy and large carnivores

Ben Rashford and Thomas Foulke from the University of Wyoming visited us. They gave a great talk on “Wolf Re-Introduction in the Northern Rockies, USA: From Population and Predation Trends to Policy and Economics”.