Author: Gracielle Higino

HGAMs working group community calls

Posted by on in BIOS2 Call, Led by fellows, Working groups

We invite you to join our series of discussions on the applications of Hierarchical Generalized Additive Models (HGAMs) in ecology. These discussions are part of a broader initiative led by BIOS2’s HGAMs working group, aimed at promoting the understanding and application of these models. 

We welcome anyone interested in GAMs, computational ecology, or eager to learn more about HGAMs to participate in the following sessions:

Each discussion will focus on the outstanding ecological questions that we could answer with HGAMs, highlighting a wide array of potential applications for specific types of ecological and evolutionary data. Join us in thinking about how we could use HGAMs to push ecological research forward!

2025 Summer School in Advanced Statistics for the Life Sciences

Posted by on in Intensive classe, Training events

It’s that time of the year again! Registrations are open for our 2025 Summer School in Advanced Statistics for the Life Sciences, this year with the theme “Hierarchical Models for the Life Sciences”. From May 5th to May 9th, 2025, we’ll meet at the beautiful Jouvence resort in Orford, QC, to learn from Guillaume Blanchet, Ph.D, and Andrew MacDonald, Ph.D, about hierarchical models with and without constraints (e.g. spatial and/or time) as well as multivariate hierarchical models.

Participants are invited to bring their own datasets, and they should have R installed in their computers, an intermediate level of knowledge in statistics and scientific programming.

Anyone interested in taking part in the summer school must complete this form by March 30, 2025.

More information on the University of Sherbrooke website.

Community Call with rainbowR

Posted by on in Non classé

The next BIOS² Community Call will be held on February 21st, 2025, at noon (ET) on Zoom. Come and talk to Ella Kaye and the rainbowR team about their career paths, how to find and nurture community and the amazing activities that the group promotes to support, promote and connect LGBTQ+ people who code in the R language.

This meeting, which is intended as a discussion rather than a presentation, is open to all. It is offered as part of the community meetings of the BIOS² training program in computational methods applied to biodiversity science.

Register here: https://bit.ly/bios2-cc-feb25

Hierarchical Generalized Additive Models

Posted by on in Led by fellows, Training events, Training Session, Working groups

On March 3rd, 2025, BIOS² will host a new training on hierarchical generalized additive models (HGAMs) by fellows Camille Lévesque and Katherine Hébert.

This course is designed to demystify hierarchical modelling as powerful tools to model population dynamics, spatial distributions, and any non-linear relationships in your ecological data. The training will be divided into two blocks. First, we will cover hierarchies in biology, data, and in models to understand what hierarchical models are, some of the forms they can take, and the fundamentals of how they work. Second, we will introduce latent variable modelling as a way to explain even more of the variation in our response variables, to better disentangle the hierarchies of variation in our data. Both blocks will include a theoretical presentation followed by hands-on coding exercises to implement and interpret hierarchical GAMs.

This training will be given in English, and the coding exercises will be done in R. We recommend installing R and RStudio prior to the workshop, and will send more detailed instructions about packages to install and data to download in the days before the workshop.

We recommend previous experience with GAMs before taking this training. If you would like to follow an introduction to GAMs before this workshop, please have a look at Eric Pedersen’s Introduction to GAMs (https://bios2.usherbrooke.ca/2021/10/20/workshop-gams-2021/), the Québec Centre for Biodiversity Science’s Workshop 8: GAMs (http://r.qcbs.ca/workshop08/book-en/) or take this BIOS²+QCBS hybrid training that will happen on February 28th, 2025.

What: Short course on hierarchical generalized additive models (3h)
When: March 3, 1pm-4pm EST (includes 15 minute break)
Where: Online on Zoom
Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/_JZMQEXhRaqxVvCKUqM4jA

Intro to GAMs : learning nonlinear curves from data

Posted by on in Training events, Training Session

BIOS² is delighted to invite you to a training session on Quarto, organised by our partner program, QCBS!

Ecologists often have data divided into groups, and within each group there are many predictors that might be important. But how to these predictors impact the outcome? Are their effects nonlinear? If you have a time series, are there cycles or another kind of complex dynamic? What about space?
GAMs are a great way to learn curving lines from data. In this workshop you’ll learn some basics of how GAMs work, how to think about them, and practice fitting them using the R package mgcv.

When: Friday, February 28th, 2025 – 13h-16h ET
Where: Online and at Concordia Library LB-322 (third floor of the library building)
Registrations: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/s0agwLV_TcqB9e0KFC_39w

How to use Quarto

Posted by on in Training events, Training Session

BIOS² is delighted to invite you to a training session on Quarto, organised by our partner program, QCBS!

Quarto is a quick and easy way to turn your R scripts into beautiful documents, presentations and even websites. It’s a new and improved version of Rmarkdown. This workshop will showcase the benefits of Quarto, including quotes, figures, maps and more. Participants may be familiar with Rmarkdown or new to it. We’ll finish by working on a project: choose between a presentation, an article or a website!

When: 18 Feb 2025 Tuesday – 2pm to 4pm ET
Where: Online and at Concordia Library LB-322 (third floor of the library)
Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/R4cL3vLzRiiNBDk-vYMSyQ