Blog – BIOS²

Open Reviewers Workshop

Posted by Gracielle Higinoon 12 June 202412 June 2024in Blog, Led by fellows, Training events, Training Session

In July, BIOS² will host a 2-hour workshop on open peer review, hosted by our fellow Allegra Spensieri. Allegra has been selected as a PREreview Champion and is now bringing to our community the principles of a fair and open peer review, with the support of PREreview.

PREreview is an organization that develops infrastructure to support the pre-print peer review process from start to end. They develop and provide training on how to write helpful reviews for preprints, and have built a platform to submit preprint reviews on, as well as a community of researchers. The open reviewers workshop is a training program that PREreview has designed for researchers at all levels to learn how to write equitable peer reviews.

This 2-hour workshop will focus on the basics of open, preprint peer reviewing and becoming aware of biases in peer review. Registrations are free and open to everyone, but seats are limited.

When: July 10th, 2024 – 1pm EST
Where: Online
Registrations: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIoce6tqz0vGtdpZPVtuBKMpLyxjR9WvqjN

Some activities that took place this summer!

Posted by KimGSon 27 October 202225 January 2023in Blog

This summer has been busy with the return of in-person events. This blog post is a look back at a few notable events for several members of the BIOS² community. Indeed, we met (and/or met for the first time) at the Ecological Society of America 2022 annual meeting held in Montreal in August, as well as at the annual BIOS² summer school in biodiversity modeling, which had as its theme Biodiversity Change and Data Visualization. In addition, two working groups organized by members of the BIOS² program were held in Sherbrooke in May and in Montreal in August.

Computing biology or biology computing?

Posted by KimGSon 26 October 202226 October 2022in Blog

Text written by William Ou, PhD candidate at UBC and BIOS² Fellow since 2021.

Just before the start of the spring term, my supervisor asked if I would be interested in giving a guest lecture on computational ecology at her Ecological Methodology class. She knew I was interested in teaching and that simulation-based research methods are becoming popular but lacking in the course syllabus, so she figured it would be a great opportunity for everyone.

Forecasting biodiversity: A matter of data availability

Posted by Francis Banvilleon 3 March 20223 May 2022in Blog, Internship experience

In a previous post, we briefly discussed our internship experience with GEO BON, in which we developed a forecasting model of local contributions to beta diversity (LCBD) at the regional scale, using communities of warblers species in Quebec and Colombia as a case study. The first part of our endeavor was getting access to data. As typical grad students in quantitative ecology, we used data mostly openly available on the internet. As mentioned in the previous post, for species occurrence, we used data from the eBird database, while environmental and land-use data were obtained from the CHELSA database and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC), respectively. While these datasets are openly available, the steps required to actually use them and the digital space they occupy could represent a challenge for someone unfamiliar with such a task.

Forecasting biodiversity: Our internship experience with GEO BON

Posted by Francis Banvilleon 17 February 20223 May 2022in Blog, Internship experience

We recently completed a two-month internship with The Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). Its headquarters having recently moved to Montreal, we immediately wanted to be part of this new chapter by contributing to a project as exciting as it is ambitious: an integrated biodiversity information system. GEO BON is indeed currently developing such an information system that would, among other things, provide real-time estimates of many biodiversity indicators at the planetary scale. Another purpose of GEO BON’s information system is to facilitate the conduction of biodiversity forecasts under different socioeconomic scenarios and enhance the plausibility and precision of these models.

What we did this summer

Posted by Katherine Heberton 31 August 20204 October 2021in Blog

This summer is weird. But we hope you are all safe and taking care of yourselves, and enjoying it as you can! We already did a lot of things in the last couple of weeks and this blog post is about remembering these good things and hoping for better days with more computational ecology training and community calls!