Introduction to the Julia language for ecological research

The BIOS² CREATE program and EcoJulia are organizing an introductory workshop to the Julia language for ecological research. The workshop will be held online and in person at Université de Sherbrooke on June 20th and 21st, 2022.

Over the course of those two days, attendees will (day 1) receive an introduction to Julia, a modern language for scientific computing, and (day 2) go through various real-life use cases of Julia for ecological research. The examples will both showcase the functionalities of the language, and notably its parallelism capacities, as well as recently developed packages that can form the basis of powerful data analysis pipelines. The examples used during day 2 will cover population dynamics, bioclimatic data, and species distribution modeling.

This 10h workshop will be conducted in 2 days on June 20th and 21st, 2022, from 9 AM – 2 PM Pacific Time / 10 – 3 PM Mountain Time / 12-5 PM Eastern Time.

The course will be taught online, in English with bilingual support. In addition, there will be a gathering of participants in-person at the University of Sherbrooke (minimum of 10 people required to conduct the in-person sessions). On-site, participants will be supported by French-speaking teaching assistants.

The workshop assumes that participants have basic notions of programming. Participants will need access to a computer with the ability to install the most recent version of Julia (1.7.2 [1]) as well as the most recent versions of Visual Studio Code (1.6.7) and the VS Code Julia package [2]. These must be installed prior to the beginning of the workshop.

The workshop will be given by Timothée Poisot, Gabriel Dansereau, Tanya Strydom, Francis Banville, and Michael D Catchen, who all have significant experience with the language, and notably with package development.

[1]: https://julialang.org/downloads/
[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=julialang.language-julia

Photo by Jesse Bauer on Unsplash