What are Conferences?
Conferences are events where researchers meet and present their research and share insights. BES Macroecology 2019 was an incredibly friendly conference with researchers from many different career stages and institutions. There are powerpoint presentations as well as poster presentations, and often workshop and discussion sessions focussing on specific issues. Here, one of the sessions I attended was a toolsharing workshop - where I learnt many neat tricks ranging from colour-blindness.com, allowing you to check through figures, using datastorr for handy versioning with updated datasets to inserting skrrrahh() at the end of your code to let you know when your code has finished running.
The topics presented were so diverse and exciting - I couldn't possibly describe them all. Isabel Fenton told us about her research understanding macroecological and macroevolutionary processes through looking at species shifts in the fossil record across latitudes with past climatic change - with species becoming more equatorial whilst keeping their range size constant in cooling periods. Sam Shrimpton took us through one of his Master's projects about the variation in eye size scaling across adults and larvae in frogs - difference in investment depended on ecotype, with fossorial species having much smaller eyes that expected. Varun Varma has been working on bananas in the BananaEx project, which looks to achieve sustainable banana trade - he has found a huge variation in response to the recent climate change and differing technologies across the world, predicting future change to have a negative impact outside of Africa and rewards for more investment in technology for African producers. Macroecology is really diverse - with research from many different fields weaving in.
Plenary speakers, notable researchers from the field, are invited to give talks, about their experiences and research. The plenaries were fantastic with Marlee Tucker fascinating us with her work in understanding how human activities affect a form of animal behaviour, namely movement, through animal tracking data, and in turn how this affects species interactions and ecosystem processes. Nick Payne taking us through his research linking heating tolerances (very important with climate change) in the laboratory to wild populations, which showed similar patterns - and he suggests using mechanistic niche modelling informing ecological understanding with physiological understanding. Dave Hodgson showing us the power of databases, like COMPADRE - which are full of life cycle demographics for lots of species from primary reviewed literature, to answer questions in ingenious ways - studying species in their native range to predict invasives but using existing datasets. Jess Haghkerdar was selected as the student plenary and she talked about her exciting work looking at how taxonomic and functional diversity, and functional composition change over successional time.
Aside from hearing the fantastic array of amazing research that is going on, it was a brilliant opportunity to get to know other people working on similar topics to me and share insights on what works and doesn't work. It is a great way to build collaborations and in fact, since the conference, a list of useful datasets, that people have come across in their research, continues to be compiled (https://tinyurl.com/MacroDataSets), and it is hoped that it will become a resource people can refer to in the future when looking for datasets.
My first conference presentation!
It was my first conference presentation at the BES Macroecology conference, and I could not have asked for a kinder or more friendly audience! I presented some of the results from my Master's project on the regional drivers of mute swan population change in England and Wales. The questions were really useful and so many ideas I have never thought of before came up as well. Since then, I have incorporated lots of these ideas into my project. It was so amazing to talk to people about my research and to see others as excited about it!
I really enjoyed the three days at conference, and I came away with ideas exploding out of my head! One thing I've decided to do after this conference is to develop a game as part of outreach (inspired by the early careers day!) - the specifics of it haven't been decided but watch this space! I really feel that engaging people from all walks of life is the key to achieving conservation success - so I want to start introducing ecological concepts through a board game of some description.
Thanks to everyone for making it such a lovely conference to be part of - amazing presentations, brilliant discussions and everything! I want to say a huge thank you to the hosts of this year's conference - Dr. Regan Early and her research group (Fundamental and Applied Biogeography research group - FABio) and the BES Macroecology Committee/Team.
Looking forward to BES Macroecology 2020 in Liverpool!
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