Welcome!
We have an exciting line-up of speakers and participants from five continents! There are over 100 delegates from 11 countries, and an interesting mix of people from different disciplines: 34% statisticians, 46% ecologists, 20% identity crisis.
Location: We will spend most of our time in the Colombo Theatres, see the interactive map for help finding us on the day.
Information packs (or lack thereof): Eco-Stats has gone Eco-Friendly - no delegate pack, just a name badge to collect at registration, and a reminder of login details for wifi. The program can be downloaded here, and the poster abstracts here, if you want a hard copy you will need to bring these with you. These were also e-mailed to you on November 18th. If you have no internet, hard copies have been posted at the registration desk in the Scientia atrium.
Welcome reception, Tuesday evening: There is a welcome reception at the White House on Tuesday evening, 5-7pm. If you are a plant ecophysiologist, the Sydney discussion group is meeting at Colombo LG01 at 5pm - if you go to that we'll save a beer for you at the White House for afterwards.
Internet: UNSW visitors will be e-mailed a login/password for the UNIWIDE guest network a week in advance of the conference. Also, we have Eduroam, for which logins from other Australian unis can work.
Workshop (Sunday-Monday): If you registered for the workshop, it will be held in the Red Centre room M020, a computer lab in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. Resources will be e-mailed to you a week in advance of the workshop. Make sure you bring your own laptop and charger so you can take your work home with you. The lab has individual powerpoints at each workstation so you can keep your laptop charged. Lunch and snacks will be provided.
Skills-building Day (Tuesday): If you are coming to Skills-Building Day on the Tuesday it will be held in Colombo Theatres B and C, with two sessions running in parallel, choose whichever you'd like (but please minimise movement between rooms during sessions). Details of which session is on when can be found in the Program. Make sure you bring your own laptop and charger so you can follow along in each tutorial. Each seat on the lecture theatres has a power point so you can keep your device charged. Lunch and snacks during breaks will be provided.
Conference Structure (Wednesday/Thursday): The conference itself, on Wednesday and Thursday, has the goal of generating ideas, not just reporting on them. The first five sessions are themed around a particular topic, with a pair of speakers from ecology and statistics (both loosely defined), and your job is to look for opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. After a short lunch break on Thursday we will have break-out sessions - one for each of the five topics - to workshop potential collaborations. So during the talks, also think about who you would like to hang out with on Thursday afternoon. We plan to deliver on these ideas - in the six months following the conference we intend to write papers for a Special Issue, as we did last conference (outcomes from last time appeared in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, April 2015 issue). If you have a particular idea you would like to work on for the Special Issue then go for it, but discuss this with your session chair to avoid duplication and maximise opportunities for collaboration. We will follow the break-out sessions on Thursday with a special session on occupancy modelling under imperfect detection, following a recent debate on the topic in the journal PLoS One. Finally, chairs will report back on all their project ideas from breakout sessions. See the program for specifics.
Poster session (Wednesday 1-2pm): We have an extended lunch on Wednesday to include a poster session (poster abstracts here). Posters will be on display for the duration of the conference but poster presenters will be sure to stay in the vicinity of their poster between 1 and 2 on Wednesday.
Methods in Ecology and Evolution panel discussion (Wednesday 4pm): Four members of the editorial board of Methods in Ecology and Evolution will attend the conference. We plan to take advantage of this by running a short panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon (as in the program), with tips if you are considering submitting to the journal. Some of the advice will be fairly generic so it could be useful even if you aren't planning to submit there!
Need help: look for someone wearing an Eco-Stats T-shirt. P(help|T-shirt) > P(help|no T-shirt)
Is lunch provided? Lunch is provided every day, and snacks during breaks. Dinner is not provided but we have some suggested venues for you Tues-Thurs if you'd like to hang with the crowd. On Tuesday evening at the Welcome reception we will shout you a beer and offer some starters.
Where is everyone? The on-line map flags some key locations on and near campus. In particular, the White House (just across from the conference venue) has beer and gourmet pizza in a historic building. The upstairs area has been reserved for us on Tuesday evening for the welcome reception, but is booked out on Wednesday evening. We will suggest an alternative in due course if you want to follow the crowd.
Feel free to tweet about how your week is going! #ecostats15
Thanks again to sponsors.
Thanks to the organising committee, in particular: Melodie McGeoch, Will Cornwell, Jakub Stoklosa, Gordana Popovic
Looking forward to catching up with you at the conference!
David Warton (chair)
