Taking the opportunity of Ian Renner’s visit, we organized thanks to the GdR EcoStat a conference on the recent advances in the modeling of species distribution. We were lucky to have the cream of researchers in the domain with Julien Papaïx, Joseph Chipperfield, Ian Renner, Joern Pagel, Bob O’Hara, Laura Pollock and Damaris Zurell.
I attended the International Congress on Biological Conservation that was held in my home town Montpellier. The students of our team were on fire and talked about their exciting work. Gilles presented a bio-economic model to study the population dynamics of Asian captive elephants, a nice example of how to explicitly incorporate interactions between captive and wild populations in species management.
We organised the first conference of the GdR EcoStat. We spent two lovely days in Lyon talking about ecological statistics with the hundred people who attended. The talks are available here.
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.
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’.
The team is leading the organisation of ISEC2014. We’re getting ready by, among many other things, preparing the delegates’ packs. Of course, these efforts cannot go without some relaxing time.
Below are the slides of my plenary talk at the 2013 EURING meeting on individual variability in capture-recapture models. I couldn’t attend, but the organizers were kind enough to run my presentation to the audience.