Author: Gracielle Higino

2025 Summer School in Biodiversity Modelling

Posted by on in Intensive classe, Training events

The 2025 edition Summer School in Biodiversity Modelling will be on the theme “Coding biodiversity: building scenarios with a global ecosystem model“. This year hosted at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, the School will provide an opportunity to further your knowledge of Biodiversity Modelling, in an informal and friendly atmosphere.

Photo by Darren Tierney on Unsplash

It has been proposed that general ecosystem models could inform policy decisions and improve our understanding of biodiversity and its functioning. Developing such models is however a daunting task that could only be achieved in team. The general objective of this edition of the Summer School in biodiversity modelling will be to investigate the joint effects of biodiversity changes and climate change on ecosystem functioning using a custom version of the Madingley model. Students will learn how to collaborate in a complex coding problem with an inter-disciplinary team, and we encourage people with diverse backgrounds to apply and compose these inter-disciplinary teams.

Prerequisites

For all applicants:

  • Minimum intermediate proficiency level in English; proficiency in French is an asset (listening and speaking)
  • Eligible to study in Canada (i.e., have the appropriate visa or be exempt from this requirement to enrol on a University course)

For applicants focused on developing biodiversity models:

  • Basic knowledge of biodiversity modelling
  • Upper-intermediate level of knowledge in scientific programming (the program will have a focus on R language, but you can use the language of your choice)
  • Familiarity with version control systems (we’ll provide advanced training)

For applicants focused on communicating biodiversity models:

  • Familiarity with biodiversity topics
  • Skills in data visualization, and/or communication and outreach in different media
Date: August 18 to 22, 2025
Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver - BC
Registration fee: 600$ (without accommodation) or 950$ (with accommodation)
Price includes course registration and meals. Members of certain programs or associations may be eligible for financial assistance to attend the event.

Registration

Anyone interested in taking part in the summer school must complete this form by June 15, 2025. Official registration (admission and payment of registration fees) will take place during the week of June 30, 2025.

More information and registration: https://www.usherbrooke.ca/ecoles-de-pointe/en/biology/2025-biodiversity-modelling

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