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, 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. More soon on our joint project on senescence and individual heterogeneity.

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. Sarah did more than well, and the discussions were lively and the debate vivid. As a general comment, I wish we, as ecologists, had more time as part of our training to think of why and how we conduct our scientific activities. Sarah has a nice paper showing that the identification of patterns and processes linking species diversity to functional or phylogenetic diversity depends on the methodological choices we make as analysts. This reminds me of the discussion about “Researcher Degrees of Freedom” on Gelman’s blog.

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. All talks were great, and I was particularly interested in Adrien Todeschini’s presentation of Biips, a software allowing the implementation of state-space models using particle filtering and a R/BUGS-like syntax.

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. We agreed on meeting again early April 2015 to carry out a comparative analysis of individual heterogeneity using the datasets shared by the group and the method developed by Hal Caswell (check it out here).

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. The discussions were stimulating with a nice balance between talks given by data providers on the first day and modelers on the second day. I gave a talk based on Anne-Sophie’s work on mapping brown bear distribution in Greece using opportunistic data. Slides below:

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’. I played around with NIMBLE a bit, here is an example of fitting a classic capture-recapture model to simulated data - thanks to Perry and Daniel for their help! NIMBLE seems a lot faster than its competitors, and much more flexible. I’ll continue my investigations with more complex models - stay tuned.

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

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

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”.