Critical Skills To Scale Up Ecology: An ESA SEEDS And NEON Workshop

Workshop Details

The Ecological Society of America’s SEEDS (Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability) program, in partnership with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), invites graduate students from underrepresented experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds to attend an interactive workshop in twice-weekly two-hour sessions September 2 to October 26, 2021, to develop key ecological data science skills and to discover ways to use NEON data. The workshop will also be an opportunity to network with a diverse community of peers and meet NEON scientists and other professionals working in the Big Data field. 

The Critical Skills to Scale Up Ecology Workshop provides critical skills for graduate students interested in working with multiple spatio-temporal datasets to address ecological questions.  Knowledge and skills learned in the workshop apply to ecological data from many different sources, including NEON. In addition to learning how to access and work with a wide variety of NEON data, this workshop emphasizes and teaches core data science skills with a focus on reproducible methods including:

• Code documentation, sharing and reproducible workflows.
• Using version control (GitHub) to support collaborative method development and to backup work.
• Documenting and publishing methods and workflows.  

The workshop contains four main components: 

• Foundational Preparation Materials: Self-paced online materials designed to provide participants with the required computer set-up information and foundational knowledge to come prepared into the workshop (expect 1-2 hrs of material depending on experience with the week’s topic). 
• Data Carpentry R for Ecologists (September sessions): Learn critical skills for reproducible research using R from the internationally recognized curriculum from Data Carpentry. 
• Explore NEON Data (October sessions): Apply skills learned in the previous days while learning to access and work with a wide-variety of ecological data products from NEON. 
• Culmination Project (Final session): Apply and reinforce the skills learned through small group-designed research projects on a topic of interest. Work starting as capstone projects from similar workshops have resulted in publications or graduate thesis for participants.  

Workshop Schedule

Location: Online. Virtual meeting link will be sent to registered participants.

Times: This schedule covers the October sessions, which are hosted by NEON. All times listed are Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4).

Homework: Each session's homework is intended to be done after the session where it is described.

5 Oct: Introduction to NEON data

7 Oct: Working with NEON data using neonUtilities

12 Oct: NEON spatial data

14 Oct: NEON data processing and QAQC

19 Oct: Capstone project working session