August 2024 Workshop Summary: Round Table

With this month’s session being the sixth consecutive monthly workshop, we thought it would be nice to have another Round Table where everyone could share updates on their latest news and projects.

There were a few themes that emerged across multiple people’s projects, including:

• Communicating analyses and results in a simple way, when stakeholders may not have time to interrogate finer nuances

• Genotype x Environment x Management interactions and challenges surrounding the use of farms or estates as the unit of observation

• Integrating data across sites that are highly variable, with multiple years and multiple responses

Some resources mentioned in the meeting were:

• Beginner machine learning resources

  • Elements of Statistical Learning and Introduction to Statistical Learning - textbooks with pdfs made freely available

  • Kaggle.com - beginner-friendly ML tutorials, datasets, models in one location

  • Simon Willison’s blog - posts on large language models at various levels

• EnvStats R package - for analysing lognormal concentration data, as well as broader environmental statistics methods

• Papers

  • Schaub et al, 2024 - review comparing stock assessment models with integrated population models

  • Birch et al, 2018 - simulation model for bovine TB in cattle (with sensitivity analysis in supplementary materials)

This was another lively meeting, with the network supporting each other by signposting information, sharing resources, and offering to make connections with others. Also emerging from discussions were new ideas for future workshops and consultancy sessions.