We left behind quite an exciting couple weeks. PopEcol fledged its first cohort of PhDs. Tina, Sam and Koen successfully defended their four years of research and received their doctoral degrees.
They are not only our first PhD fledglings, but also among the founding members of PopEcol. It was difficult to say bye to the trio, who has been with us since the beginning of our group. We can only hope that this separation anxiety gets easier with future fledglings.
We wish them all the best for their future (and very much hope to be a part of that future)! 🙂
Here are the proud carriers of the amazing PhD hats:
Tina Cornioley
Thesis title: “Trait-mediated effects of climate on the population dynamics of the wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans)”
Sam Cruickshank
Thesis title: “Dealing with uncertainty in amphibian and reptile population monitoring for conservation”
Koen van Benthem
Thesis title: “Trait-based mechanistic and phenomenological approaches for predicting population dynamics”
Last week, I headed off to the University of Canterbury in the UK to present at the Amphibian Conservation Research Symposium. This is the fourth year that I’ve attended this meeting ,which aims to bring together researchers from all around the world working on all facets of amphibian conservation.
The attendees in Canterbury Photo credit: @AmphibianCon
For me, the meeting is always one of the major highlights of the year; an opportunity to get out of the office and network with a crowd of incredibly diverse people united with an infectious passion for amphibian conservation. As I’m in the final months of my PhD (and am therefore chained to my computer frantically writing up my thesis) this year was particularly rejuvenating- giving me a chance to live vicariously through the experiences shared by my fellow attendees. I may not have the time to do any fieldwork this year, but hearing about people scuba diving to discover the breeding ecology of critically endangered frogs, or using drones to survey bromeliads for cryptic amphibian species, cannot fail to inspire.
Undoubtedly a new life-goal for me: Arturo Muñoz Saravia surveying breeding behaviour of the Titicaca Water Frog through high-altitude scuba diving Photo credit: @TetZoo
ACRS always aims for a very broad mixture of talks, and this year was no exception. Topics spanned research into animal husbandry, infectious diseases (always necessarily a major topic in amphibian research, sadly), monitoring for cryptic species, and species’ reintroductions, to name just a few. These were complemented by a great set of keynote speakers. This year the key message I took from these talks is just how large and co-ordinated the amphibian conservation community is. Keynote talks from Anne Baker and Phil Bishop reminded me that although applied conservation often seems like working in a small-scale bubble, there is a whole alphabet soup of organisations (ASA, AArc, IUCN SSC ASG….the list is as endless as it is bewildering) co-ordinating across the globe to improve the fate of amphibians.
Penultimate talk of the conference: when can we rely on analysis of amphibian count data? Photo credit: @AmphibianCon
One great aspect of ACRS is their Future Leaders programme: each year, the committee funds the attendance costs of several early-career researchers who have made substantial achievements in amphibian conservation in their host country. This years’ leaders hailed from Nepal, Brazil, India and South Africa, and each gave great presentations and insight into working in countries where things operate very differently to Europe! Particularly notable was Sethu Parvathy’s impressive and hilarious one-woman theatre performance of the persecution of frogs in cardamom farms in India (simultaneously from the perspective of farmers, frogs and rats), and the inspirational work of Luis Marin da Fonte. His involvement in discovering the only known population of a species new to science (the aptly named Admirable Red-belly toad) and securing protection of this site by successfully campaigning against the building of a hydroelectric plant upstream from the population, drew a spontaneous round of applause from the audience.
ACRS Future Leaders; Biraj Shretha, Luis Marin da Fonte, Sethu Parvathy and Fortunate Phaka Photo credit: @AmphibianCon
My contribution to the meeting was a talk warning of the pitfalls of analysing count data; as the penultimate speaker on the last day of the conference, giving a talk on population modelling to a tired audience seemed like an uphill battle. However, I was happy to be approached by several people after the talk who were interested in my solution to the issues of non-closure in count data, and I hope that some fruitful collaborations will result from the meeting.
The inspirational story of the Admirable Red-belly toad Photo credit: @AgentAmphibian
Thanks to the organisers at the University of Canterbury for organising another great conference! And also to Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology for writing up this great summary of the conference.
Sam won the prize for the best student talk at the Amphibian Conservation Research Symposium (ACRS) with his talk: ““Testing whether conservation action works: does the creation of stepping-stone ponds increase dispersal?”. Criteria were the style of the presentation, the science and the relevance for real-world conservation.
‘Don’t feign to be stupid.’ This well-chosen phrase of Marc Kéry introduced some of our group members to the world of Bayesian Statistics (where the use of your previous knowledge on the parameter you’re interested in, the prior distribution, plays a role). Together with Michael Schaub, Marc taught the inspiring course entitled ‘Bayesian population analysis using WinBUGS’ based on the book of the same name.
I was impressed by how they managed to cover almost the whole book within 5 days: starting with a gentle introduction to the analysis of distribution, abundance and population dynamics using a Bayesian framework, followed by an introduction to the software WinBUGS and implementation of mixed models in it, and finishing with some examples of the implementation of Integrated Population Models in WinBUGS. Lectures were alternated with useful exercises.
I think all the participants are after this course better trained in making a balanced decision whether they want to make use of the full knowledge they have, or use the veil of stupidity to make big discoveries (Schwartz, 2008).
Tina Cornioley
