Workshops

GSA Workshops

The GSA will organize three workshops on Monday, 4 November 2019, combined with an outdoor adventure for student participants at the meeting to get better acquainted with each other. 

• An introduction to ecological forecasting in lakes (half day, morning) - Instructor: Jake Zwart
  1) Theory of ecological forecasting and modeling options. 
  2) Examples and opportunities of ecological forecasting in lakes. 
  3) Running a forecast example and discussion of how to apply to various lake questions. 
  4) Discussion of creating an ecological forecasting WG / code base for GLEON. 
  This workshop is for all skill levels and no prior knowledge of ecological forecasting techniques is needed. Laptop is not required but there may be some hands on portions where having a laptop or sharing with a partner will be helpful. If bringing a laptop, please have R and R Studio installed. 
   
• Simple guidelines for writing scientific papers (half day, afternoon) - Instructor: Ben Kraemer
  Our careers and our science depend on our ability to write effectively. Well-written papers motivate others to read our work, recognize its message, and integrate that message into our collective scientific understanding. However, many scientists are under-trained in how to write effectively. This workshop will present a few simple guidelines to help us write well-structured manuscripts that get published sooner and cited more often. The workshop will also include “hands-on” activities using examples of your own writing and/or examples from published literature. 
   
• Tidyverse: reading, graphing, and manipulating data from a non-programmer's view (full day) - Instructor: Bill Perry
  As scientists, we need to efficiently examine raw data and summarize it graphically. Tidyverse and associated tools (Plotly, Patchwork, and Scales) in R provide a fast and user friendly interface to R that may be easier for some than traditional R coding. The first part of the morning we will cover reading CSV and Excel files, graphically exploring using GGPlot, and summarizing data. In the afternoon we will expand into more advanced dataset, variable and date-time manipulations. We will finish with a live coding exercise to explore one or two of your datasets. I expect you to come with R (3.6.1 or higher), RStudio (1.2.1335 or higher), and libraries tidyverse, devtools installed and  running on your computer (I will be available for help the night before).
   
• Student outdoor adventure - In addition to the GSA workshop sessions, there will be 1-2 hours in the afternoon for "getting acquainted" activities where student attendees can explore the area, interact and get to know each other, and/or participate in some sports or other outside activities. The GSA will coordinate with the host organizations about local activities at the Deerhurst Resort (Muskoka) venue.

Others are free to choose the Monday GSA workshops regardless of current position (student, postdoc, faculty or others). However, please be reminded that GSA-led workshop organizers reserve the right to prioritize workshop materials for students, and hands-on exercises may be prepared with graduate students as target audience in mind.