Macroecology
Secretary: Nick Isaac
Aim:
To provide a UK forum to unite researchers who work in, or who are influenced by, macroecology within which we hope to:
- help set the agenda for macroecology
- support early-career researchers
- promote data access and standards
- facilitate inter-disciplinary collaboration
- showcase methodological advances
Welcome to the new Macroecology Special Interest Group!
Contact:
To join, simply send an email to LISTSERV@JISCMAIL.AC.UK with a blank subject header and the following text:
JOIN BESMACROECOLOGY YourFirstName YourLastName
Once you’re a member, please join discussion about the group’s direction via BESMACROECOLOGY@JISCMail.ac.uk.
Facebook group now live at “BES Macroecology SIG”
Follow us on Twitter @BESMacroecol
Communications Officer: Tom Webb
Committee Members: Rob Freckleton, Sally Keith, Ally Phillimore
Events
Macroecology Meeting in Sheffield
This year’s Macroecology group meeting will be held on 10th-11th July in Sheffield. We are delighted to welcome Ethan White from Utah State University as our keynote speaker. Ethan uses quantitative macroecological approaches, combining large databases, advanced statistical analysis, and theoretical models to understand broad scale ecological patterns. He is also a big advocate of open science and we really look forward to hearing his views on macroecology and ecological scholarship more generally.
In the rest of the meeting, we want to hear what you’re up to, so we propose a series of sessions including short research talks (5 minutes, possibly following the ‘ignite’ format, i.e. 20 slides, 15 seconds/slide) and organised around four themes:
- The role of history in macroecology
- Putting process into macroecology
- Data: deficits and solutions
- Making macroecology matter in a human-dominated world
We strongly encourage talks from researchers at all levels, working on any system (wet or dry) and across taxa (extinct or extant). The themes above are to guide discussions, please feel free to interpret them liberally – we want you to help shape the direction of this meeting. We plan to follow each group of talks with lengthy discussion sessions, and we will also run more practical ‘how-to’ sessions in which experienced researchers will use specific examples from their own published work to explain the methods required to go from raw data to final analysis and publication-quality figures.
Conference Dinner
On the evening of Thursday 11th July we will have a conference dinner at the Kelham Island Museum, part of the Sheffield Industrial Museums trust which is a treasure trove of Sheffield’s world famous industrial heritage. The three course sit-down meal is offered at the subsidised rate of £30 (£20 for students) and we do hope you will join us (accommodation for the night of the 11th is pre-arranged; see below).
Registration
Registration for the 2 day conference is just £75 for BES members and £45 for student members. Rates for non-members are £130 standard and £75 students. (The mathematicians among you may notice that it is cheaper to join the BES and pay the members’ rate than to pay the non-members’ rate – so join here!). We have arranged B&B accommodation for the nights of 10th and 11th in modern en suite halls of residence located on the conference site at the rate of £40 per night standard and £25 per night student. The conference will start around midday on 10th so we anticipate most delegates travelling to Sheffield that morning. Anyone requiring accommodation on the 9th, or on the 12th, will need to arrange it themselves, either at the same location as the conference via http://withus.com/conferencewithus/accommodation/ or in a local hotel. You can register online for the meeting, including accommodation and the dinner, here. Hurry as places are limited!
Related Events
Following on from the meeting, on 12th July we have teamed up with the Computational Ecology group to present a free one-day course on ‘Spatial Analysis in R’. This aims to teach users of the leading open source statistical computing environment R to handle and map spatial data. The course is already fully subscribed, but BES members can be added to the waiting list by filling in the registration form here.
More Information
Meeting updates will be posted on Twitter (@BESMacroecol), on the BES Macroecogloy SIG Facebook group, and on the JISC mailing list. Any questions can be emailed to besmacroecol@me.com