International Congress on Biological Conservation

I attended the International Congress on Biological Conservation that was held in my home town Montpellier. The students of our team were on fire and talked about their exciting work. Gilles presented a bio-economic model to study the population dynamics of Asian captive elephants, a nice example of how to explicitly incorporate interactions between captive and wild populations in species management.

Julie talked about her use of opportunistic data to map the colonisation of the wolf in France; this is a neat example of how to generate non-detections by carefully assessing the observation efforts to use dynamic occupancy models.

Anne-Sophie presented an application of Poisson point process modeling to map the presence of brown bear presence in Greece using citizen science data with possible observer bias.

Blaise presented his results on a sociological survey to assess the attitudes of local residents towards the presence of Brown bears in the Pyrenees.

Last, Laetitia had a poster on the use of a spatially explicit individual-based model to explore the best strategies (reintroductions and / or corridors) to restore the population of lynx in the Vosges mountains.

I gave a talk on a review of the methods to analyse citizen science data. This was part of a symposium (nicely summarised by Muki Haklay here) organised by Karine Princé and Wes Hochachka. Stay tuned, a paper is on its way!

Overall, the program of this conference was dense, the talks and discussions between sessions were stimulating, I’m looking forward to attending the next one!