ISEC in Wales and Lithuanian travels

by Coralie Williams

Last month, I attended the International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) in Swansea, UK. This was my first time attending ISEC, and I was excited as I had heard it was a friendly environment for networking with ecological statisticians and the R developer community.
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To start off, optional pre-conference workshops were offered. These workshops provided a great way to overcome jetlag, get into the stats/coding rhythm, and meet people in a smaller setting before all the attendees arrived. I often find that the first day of any conference can be overwhelming, so this was particularly beneficial. I attended the workshop on RTMB, a new R package designed to run flexible models with TMB (Template Model Builder) directly in plain R code. We received valuable tips from Anders Nielsen, one of the TMB maintainers, and Ben Bolker, the GLMM guru.

The conference itself was packed with a diverse range of topics, from software development to sophisticated multi-species models. While most presentations focused on animal taxa applications, there were also interesting topics on the modelling fungi distribution with spatially explicit capture-recapture models and models to predict different apple species flowering time. During the poster sessions, I presented my first PhD chapter, which is a meta-research project proposing ways to improve the reporting of simulation studies evaluating statistical methods. I was very pleased with the interest it generated. 

Ecostats team attending ISEC in Swansea.

A highlight for me was attending this conference with the Ecostats team from my joint supervisor David Warton’s lab. It was great to get to know each other in a different setting and to see familiar faces throughout the week. I also enjoyed supporting the team in their talks throughout the conference. Additionally, I had the opportunity to attend the SORTEE (the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) meet-up, where I met other fellow SORTEE members.

​Overall, it was a great experience, and it reminded me of the importance of in-person conferences for promoting one’s work, networking with current and potential collaborators, gaining new perspectives on my own research and feeling part of a community.
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After the conference, I travelled to Lithuania for some time off. This was a special trip; Lithuania has a lot of folk tales and many beautiful national parks. When we were on the Baltic seaside, I found small amber stones along the beach, just as described in the tale of Jūratė and Kastytis.

Amber stones found on the Baltic seaside close to Nida, Lithuania.

I am grateful that, through my PhD, I have had the opportunity to travel to an in-person conference and connect with inspiring statisticians and R developers, which has motivated me in my current work. I am also thankful to have had time to pause and reflect before diving back into what is now my third year of my PhD!