Networking Sketch

In October 2023 the network met for its first conference. There were lots of great discussions and we wanted to find a way to continue to build more connections between network members.

We decided that it would be a great idea if the NABES community could have an opportunity to meet every month in a virtual interactive workshop. We are developing a program of monthly workshops.

We also plan to use this blog to give a summary of each workshops.

In our March workshop our main focus was on getting to know each other better. This included a randomly allocated 10 minute 1-1 chat with someone and a Round Table where everyone shared their latest news and projects.

Some things that were shared included:

Papers

Colin Birch (Animal and Plant Health Agency) shared a new paper he published in Nature Scientific Reports on Badger Control policy. He stated that it was a different way of tackling the difference-in-difference approach.
Oli Pescott (UKCEH) shared a pre-print Towards a unified approach to formal risk of bias assessments for causal and descriptive inference He invited comments and contributions from people as he would like to further develop it before submitting to peer review.

Interesting websites/packages etc

Dave Skirvin (ADAS) has been finding the DEFRA Data Science Centre of Excellence Github pages useful for development of Government focussed data visualisations.
Nick Schurch (BioSS) described his methodological work under the current RESAS (Rural & Environmental Science & Analytical Services) Scottish Government programme developing an R package to test the impact of biases on the results from joint species distribution models.

News

Ed Harris (Harper Adams University) noted that the university is launching an Applied Data Science BSc at their new Telford campus (Harper@Telford) as part of the UK Levelling Up initiative to help close the digital skills gap.

The discussion was really lively with lots of sharing of information, offers to put people in contact with each other and suggestions and ideas for two new interactive sessions.