Workshops on offer for ESA 2023
The following workshops are available for selection when you register for the conference. Workshops are mostly inclusive for full and Thursday day registrations. Unless stated otherwise, all workshops will be held at the Darwin Convention Centre.
Introduction to Kaleidoscope Pro for Acoustic Analysis
Facilitated by Harry Rust
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:30pm – 4:30pm)
Ready to take your acoustic analysis skills to the next level? Discover how Kaleidoscope Pro can increase your productivity by quickly searching large recording datasets for your target sounds, automatically generating a list of resulting signals and creating clusters of similar signals from this list. Spend more of your time analysing information that is relevant to you and less of it wading through your data.
We’ll give you an in-depth understanding of Kaleidoscope Lite (free analysis software) and demonstrate Kaleidoscope Pro 5’s clustering feature, which can be used in the analysis of birds, frogs, flying-foxes, koalas and more. We will focus on analysing sound that we can hear but Kaleidoscope also has dedicated bat-call analysis features for ultrasonic insectivorous bat vocalisations.
This workshop is aimed at ecologists who are entering the field of eco-acoustics and requires no prior experience. We will provide a training license for the software and recommended that attendees bring their own laptop to play along. By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to confidently apply what you have learned to your acoustic recording data.
If discussed beforehand, attendees may stay after the workshop has concluded to work through data from their personal projects with assistance from the Faunatech team.
Attendees bring their own laptops (recommended but optional).
Limited spaces
Australian Vegetation Classification Workshop
Facilitated by the ESA Australian Vegetation Classification Research Chapter
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:30pm – 4:30pm)
ESA’s Australian Vegetation Classification (AUVC) Research Chapter consists of botanists, vegetation scientists, ecologists and policy makers from across government, the private sector and academia. We are progressing vegetation classification in Australia in multiple ways – from the analysis of Australian vegetation plot datasets, to building the profile of Australian vegetation types internationally.
Do you deal with inconsistent vegetation datasets and typologies on a regular basis?
Are you confronted with ‘reinventing the wheel’, as a result of no floristic classification system existing across jurisdictional boundaries?
Do you find that available data and information is inadequate for informing decision making?
Do you use vegetation plot-based data for mapping, monitoring, modelling, carbon accounting, planning, threatened species and /or ecological communities assessments?
Did you attend the ‘Putting the floristics back into vegetation management’ symposium?
If you answered YES to any of the above questions, then this WORKSHOP is for you.
Come along to share gaps in knowledge, inconsistencies, ideas, the work you are engaged in, and how to become actively involved in solutions to these challenges!
Take part in developing ‘End Use Cases’ to inform and promote WHY Australia requires a consistent vegetation typology based on vegetation plot-data that can be cross-walked, and that will enhance existing classification systems that have national and international relevance and applications.
Writing for Publication
Facilitated by Nigel Andrew
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:30pm – 4:30pm)
The goal of this interactive workshop is to aid participants in thinking about publishing research from the beginning of the research journey and in overcoming anxiety about publishing research in the process.
It is primarily focused towards researchers who are at the beginning of the publication treadmill. However, there will be plenty of tips for those who have been through the publication process a few times.
Potential Content – depending on interests of participants :
- How to Publish Without Perishing
- What to publish?
- Constructing a paper
- Effective science writing
- The publication pipeline
- Authorship
- Publication ethics
- Which journal?
- Promoting your research
Using the ‘galah’ R Package to Source Open Biodiversity Data
Facilitated by Martin Westgate
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:30pm – 4:30pm)
‘galah’ is an open-source R package to source data from biodiversity informatics facilities, such as the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). While this information is commonly used in a range of research applications – particularly those focussed on understanding past and future species distributions – it can be difficult for users to filter the large amount of available information to the subset required to answer their particular question. In this workshop we will introduce ‘galah’, and demonstrate the features it supports for summarizing and filtering data on particular taxa, locations, or from specific providers or data resources. This will be useful both for researchers new to the R programming environment wishing to learn the basics, and for more experienced researchers to understand the range of data types available from the ALA.
How to submit data to the Atlas of Living Australia – cancelled
Facilitated by Martin Westgate
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:30pm – 4:30pm)
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is Australia’s largest biodiversity data repository, and is the Australian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Despite its’ size, it has previously been challenging for individuals or groups of ecologists to submit data to the ALA, for two reasons: the underlying data format (Darwin Core) is rarely used in applied research; and there is no clear toolset for generating data in the correct format and uploading it to the ALA. In this workshop, we will outline the structure of the Darwin Core format, demonstrate tools for constructing a Darwin Core Archive from provided or example datasets, and show how the resulting data is represented within the ALA. This should be useful for ecologists of all career stages who wish to archive data from historic or ongoing projects in a reusable manner.
ALLY Training
Facilitated by Leanda Mason
Date: Monday 3 July (1:00pm – 2:00pm) and Thursday 6 July (2:30pm – 4:30pm)
Venue: TBC
A workshop for any interested ecologist who would like to know how to be a good ALLY to peoples of diverse sexuality, sex and/or gender. It will be targeted for ecologists, with examples (and jokes) specific to the field of ecology. It may be that their organisation does not already offer this kind of training, or they have not had time to complete it while working.
Content will include how intersectionality and identity relate to equitable input from all peoples into ecology in terms of barriers. Delineation of sex, sexuality and gender as separate spectrums of identity and what is acceptable to discuss in relationships. Also, more practical and actionable advice like; What are pronouns? How to be non-performative in Allyship. Avoiding microaggressions, stereotypes and biases.
Using the EcoCommons’ Point-and-click Dashboards to Discover Data, run Species Distribution Models and make Climate Projections – cancelled
Facilitated by Elisa Bayraktarov, Abhimanyu Raj Singh, and Andrew Schwenke
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:00pm – 4:00pm)
Venue: TBC
Recent technologies have enabled consistent and continuous collection of ecological data at high resolutions across large spatial scales. A big challenge that all ecologists and practitioners face is to find the best available data and then to apply appropriate methods to that data. EcoCommons Australia is building a platform where an increasing number of datasets are accessible at the click of a button, and where we will grow the number of scientific workflows that are shared within the research community. The EcoCommons platform provides Virtual Laboratories where you can run Species Distribution Models, Climate Projections, Ensemble Modelling, Biosecurity Risk Mapping, Community Modelling, Species Trait Models and more with only a few clicks of your mouse. EcoCommons also offers an easy and streamlined access to species occurrence records and environmental predictors. EcoCommons saves users time by giving them access to large environmental raster datasets in formats that can easily be overlayed with the same extent, resolution and projection. These time saving steps give you more time to focus on the most important and hardest part in your work or study: your Science.
Here we present an overview of the EcoCommons platform and introduce workshop participants to Species Distribution and other Modelling approaches. Species Distribution Models (SDM) can be used to understand the potential distribution of a species based on available species occurrence records and environmental variables. In this workshop, we demonstrate how to construct an SDM with freely available data and show the ease with which a variety of SDM algorithms can be trialled. We also show you how to predict the possible shift of those distributions under different Climate Change emission scenarios. At the end of the workshop participants will have a good overview of the available ‘curated’ datasets through EcoCommons.
This workshop is most suited to undergraduate & postgraduate students, early career researchers, ecologists and practitioners who would like to trial advanced modelling but have limited time and coding experience.
A Beginner’s Guide to Data Analysis and Visualisation in Python for Ecologists using EcoCommons’ Coding Cloud
Facilitated by Amanda Buyan and Andrew Schwenke
Date: Thursday 6 July (4:30pm – 6:30pm)
EcoCommons Australia is building the platform of choice to analyse and model ecological and environmental problems while also increasing researchers’ digital literacy. This workshop will focus on increasing your computational skills by introducing you to how the Python programming language can be used for data analysis and visualisation in Ecology. By the end of the workshop, participants will have an overview of how to run their Python code in the EcoCommons’ cloud environment ‘Coding Cloud‘, and how to use key Python libraries for easy data analysis. In particular, we will give you a quick overview of the Python syntax, what different types of variables there are in Python, and how to harness the {Pandas} library to easily manipulate data. At the end, we will show you how to plot your data using {Matplotlib}.
When ecologists become better at coding, the pathways to solving environmental challenges increase vastly and the ways to solve environmental problems are only limited by your imagination rather than by the software you use. Learning coding skills early will save hours of coding heart-ache later on. This workshop is suitable for early career researchers, undergraduates, postgraduates and ecologists who have a keen interest in learning how to code in Python while harnessing the power of cloud computing to solve environmental challenges. This course is very suitable for researchers and practitioners who have some basic Python experience and coding skills and have the desire to learn how to use code within the cloud-computing resources of EcoCommons. It is also well suited for people who would like to refresh their coding skills in Python.
A Beginner’s Guide to Data Analysis and Visualisation in R for Ecologists using EcoCommons’ Coding Cloud – cancelled
Facilitated by Andrew Schwenke, Elisa Bayraktarov and Abhimanyu Raj Singh
Date: Thursday 6 July (4:30pm – 6:30pm)
EcoCommons Australia is building the platform of choice to analyse and model ecological and environmental problems while also increasing researchers’ digital literacy. This workshop will focus on increasing the computational skills of the conference delegates by showing them how the statistical program R can be used for data analysis and visualisation in Ecology. By the end of the workshop participants will have an overview of how to run their R code in the EcoCommons’ cloud environment ‘Coding Cloud’ and how to use the R package {tidyverse} to manipulate and visualise their data. In particular, we will demonstrate how to use the functions ‘select’ and ‘filter’ to manipulate your data and how to use the ‘pipe operator’ for more complex data manipulation such as ‘summarise’, ‘group_by’ and ‘count’ for basic summary statistics. At the end, we will show you how to visualise your data using different plots in the R package {ggplot2}.
When ecologists become better at coding, the pathways to solving environmental challenges increase vastly and the ways to solve environmental problems are only limited by your imagination rather than by the software you use. Learning coding skills early will save hours of coding heart-ache later on. This workshop is suitable for early career researchers, undergraduates and ecologists who have a keen interest in learning how to code in R while harnessing the power of cloud computing to solve environmental challenges. This course is very suitable for researchers and practitioners who have some basic R experience and coding skills and have the desire to learn how to use code within the cloud-computing resources of EcoCommons. It is also well suited for people who would like to refresh their coding skills in R.
For participants to get the most out of this workshop, it is recommended to have some basic R experience including using RStudio such as: setting up a working directory and loading data. Workshop participants will also require a laptop with the software R and the editor RStudio installed to run their own code as well as internet connection.
Top End Invertebrate Blitz!
Facilitated by Nick Volpe and Lucyna Kania
Date: Thursday 6 July (2:45pm – 4:30pm)
Venue: Museum and Art Gallery of the NT Theatrette
Let’s explore the incredible world of invertebrates in the Northern Territory! Come for a photographic presentation on invertebrates, guided Tiny Territory Exhibition and to meet live bugs! Hosts Nick Volpe and Lucyna Kania are co-curators of the Tiny Territory Exhibition at MAGNT and enthusiastic naturalists who have been photographing invertebrates for five years in Darwin.
A small fee $10 TBC will be applied.