Conferences, Conferences/Meetings/Workshops

Emily and Byron attend the international symposium “Future 4 Butterflies in Europe”

Emily and Byron attended the international symposium “Future 4 Butterflies in Europe” in Wageningen, Netherlands. Emily gave a talk at a workshop on butterfly monitoring in Europe entitled “Recent developments for modelling butterfly monitoring data: GAM and GAI” and gave a talk at the conference entitled “Dynamic models for butterfly monitoring data”. Byron gave a talk entitled “Modelling migrant butterfly species data”.

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grants, Prizes

SE@K project awarded Sciences Faculty Competition scholarship

The project, titled  Studying migration patterns of UK bird populations using Bayesian nonparametric models, was proposed by Dr Eleni Matechou in collaboration with Dr Alison Johnston from the British Trust for Ornithology and Professor Jim Griffin from SMSAS.

Summary of the proposal: The PhD student on this collaborative project will develop and use novel and sophisticated statistical models, namely Bayesian nonparametric models, to understand patterns of bird migration within the UK. The data to be analysed refer to bird species that breed in the UK and spend the winter in Africa. These are collected by the BTO as part of the Constant Effort Sites (CES) monitoring scheme. The analyses will describe the migration patterns, phenology, population sizes and distribution of these species. Links between these demographic parameters and environmental covariates will be explored to explain the mechanisms leading to patterns and changes (for example, climate change leading to earlier migration). The results will also be used to inform conservation management strategies. As well as a number of scientific manuscripts describing the statistical models and the ecological processes, the student will also produce freely-available software that will be used by the BTO in the future and by any interested researchers to fit the models to their own data.

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Conferences, grants, Prizes

Congratulations to Ming for her IBC bursary

SE@K student Ming Zhou was awarded £500 for attending IBC 2016 in Victoria BC, Canada.

Ming’s application was judged by the Biometric Society and the Fisher Memorial Trust.

As a recipient of a bursary Ming will provide a one page report after the conference summarising how she has benefited scientifically from attendance, to be published on the Regional website.

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Conferences/Meetings/Workshops

Occupancy workshop

Diana, Eleni and Rachel gave a 3 day long workshop on occupancy modelling.

The workshop took place 13-15 of January at the University of Kent.

The 20 or so participants were exposed to the ideas behind basic and advanved occupancy models from classical and Bayesian perspectives.

There  were theory and practical sessions, the latter covering R and Presence.

On the last day, participants discussed about their own projects and data with the SE@K group. All of the projects were interesting and some will undoubtedly lead to more collaborations in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

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