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Women in Science - Distinguished Visitors Program

October sees the third part of the Women in Science: Distinguished Visitors Program. We have two very distinguished visitors lined up, and the theme will be a spatial and environmental sciences one. The exceptional visitors we have lined up cross the pre-BEES discipline boundaries very nicely, providing a great chance for school-wide participation.

OUR VISITORS

Professor Mary Scholes from Wits University, South Africa, is a biogeochemist with an interest in soils and savanna ecosystems. She will be in the school from Monday 10 - Friday 14 October, with her main Women in Science days here being Wednesday 12-Friday 14.

Professor Janet Franklin from UC San Diego has research interests in landscape ecology, plant ecology, biogeography, biophysical remote sensing, digital terrain analysis, and geographic information science. She will be in the school on Thursday 13, Friday 14 and Monday 17 October.

The visitors will present back-to-back seminars on Thursday 13 October starting at 3.30pm in Matthews Lecture Theatre B. This will be followed by drinks and canapes outside (weather permitting). The seminars are pitched at a general scientific audience, and are always a highlight of the visits.

The "women in science" workshop will be held on Friday 14 October from 2-5pm. This event is the only women-only one, and is designed particularly for early-career women, including honours and postgraduate students, postdocs and research staff.

There are plenty of half-hour or hour-long sessions for one-on-one meetings with our vistors for any members of the school who wish to meet our visitors.

A spatial analysis workshop with Janet, aimed especially at graduate students, will be held on Friday morning, 14 October, from 10-12. An outline is below.

Please email Firoza (f.cooperunsw.edu.au) if you wish to:

Participate in the Women in Science workshop

Meet with Janet, Mary or both (state preference of hour or half-hour meeting and day)

As a lab, take our visitors to lunch or to Dinner (Mary - Weds, Thurs available for both meals; Janet - Thurs, Mon available for both meals)

Volunteer to help with any aspect of organization.

Professor Janet Franklin is offering a two hour workshop on Friday morning, 14 October, from 10-12. The workshop will be largely hands-on and is of particular relevance to anyone analysing spatial data, particularly postgraduate students. The methods can be applied to data from local scales of the order of metres up to continental and global scales.

Could those of you planning to attend please let Firoza know (f.cooper@unsw.edu.au). The workshop will be held in room 640 or G11, as numbers dictate.

Spatial Inference and Prediction with Biogeographical Data.
Maps of actual or potential species distributions are required for many aspects of resource management and conservation planning including biodiversity assessment, habitat management and restoration, single- and multiple species and habitat conservation plans, population viability analysis, modeling community and ecosystem dynamics, and predicting the effects of climate change on species and ecosystems. A growing number of quantitative methods are being used both inferentially, to identify the parameters that determine habitat suitability, and predictively, to assign habitat value to locations where biological survey data are lacking (most of the earth's surface).

There are three impediments to the effective use of these modeling tools by both researchers and conservation and resource managers:

too few of the existing applications explicitly incorporate the spatial dependence inherent in biospatial data into the modeling methods
the statistical and GIS modeling tools are not always well integrated, and,
the proliferation of potential methods (including parametric and non-parametric statistical models, machine learning approaches, and those incorporating spatial dependence -- regression kriging, spatial autoregressive models), and conflicting results regarding their efficacy, is daunting to users.

I will discuss a framework to guide the operational use of these methods for biodiversity assessment and landscape management.