Christmas did indeed arrive early – though I ate plenty of mince pies all through December, the real festive and jolly spirit didn’t hit me till the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting in Liverpool. 2016 was a great year for dreams coming true, one of them being presenting a talk at the BES conference. At the conference last year in Edinburgh, I thought that it is just so cool, and I made a wish to someday present myself. I tend to be rather impatient when it comes to achieving goals, this being probably the one time that I reached a target sooner than I thought I would.
I got very helpful feedback on my talk from my supervisors (Dr Albert Phillimore and Dr Allan Perkins) and TeamShrub (where I’m a research assistant now, check out their blog full of fieldwork stories and great science), edited, rehearsed and edited again, and after a pleasant train journey from Edinburgh to Liverpool, there I was – at a real conference with real scientists. And I was one of them. Having just wrapped up Coding Club for 2016, it seemed very appropriate to start the BES conference with their Best Practices for Code Archiving workshop. I was very keen to learn more about code archiving, but I also wanted to see how other people teach coding and organise workshops. I will be leading a GitHub and version control workshop for Coding Club soon, and I’m looking forward to sharing the knowledge and skills I gained at BES with the Coding Club members.
There were many great talks in the following days, and I was particularly impressed by the PhD talks. It was so interesting to learn about Francesca Mancini‘s interdisciplinary conservation research on how social media images can be used to infer eco-tourism hotspots – and good to know that my photos on Flickr could have been used for science! Sarah Scriven gave a very well presented talk on butterfly movement through oil palm plantations (and in the spirit of #BEScode, the data and code are publicly available). Great to highlight not just connectivity between fragmented landscapes, but also functional connectivity – even if butterflies can move through agricultural land, their larval host plants might not occur there, thus preventing breeding.
In addition to pondering issues I hadn’t considered before, of course it was also fantastic to learn more about topics I do think about a lot – agro-ecology and conservation, in particular the evaluation of conservation policies such as the EU’s agri-environment schemes. There were talks on hedgerows, tillage, grassland land management options, pesticide application, and of course my favourite part were the discussions on how to evaluate scheme performance and improve it. Questions like: “Are the right land management options implemented in the right place (or scale)?” hint that local factors and the complexity of the surrounding landscape can play an important role in mediating AES effectiveness. The Conservation Evidence initiative has gathered an impressive database of evaluations of conservation actions, including those implemented on farmland, so you can browse through and see how different land management options are performing. I’d be interested to also see how those options are performing together – is there a winning combination, a cost-effective set of options, and how would that set of options vary across space (as a universal solution seems improbable to me)?
Chatting with keen ecologists over lunch was super fun (and the food was tasty, too!), the Science Comedy Slam was hilarious, and in general I loved the dynamic of the whole conference – I came home inspired and thankful that I get to be a part of the ecology research community. I’m writing this blog post almost a month after the conference (can you tell that I didn’t attend the workshop on organisation and managing stress?), to keep a record of the first major conference I presented at, but also to thank all those who attended and all the organisers for being a friendly and welcoming community – you’re part of what makes science great!