Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Dear CAnMove Members,

we are approaching the ending of 2014, which has been a very active and successful year for the CAnMove program. Still we can enjoy temperatures above zero and some birds have still not left Sweden for wintering further south. In my garden the European robin sang side by side with the wren this morning.

We have passed the Swedish Research Council Midterm Evaluation of the program with continued funding and very good review and recommendation from the expert panel. We can now look forward with confidence and seek support for the longterm future ahead.

The database work is taking form thanks to Mats dedicated work and we are at the stage where we now very soon can fill the database with our varions tracking data, making comparative work and efficient handling of data as well as increasing the visibility as we have planned. Åke Lindström has further taking on the job to coordinate our interests in a planned national database iniative called SeIBER, where CAnMove will be part.

Our technical lab led by Johan and Arne is developing innovative microdataloggers, support projects on computer vision needs by Giuseppe and bioinformatics from Björn with great success. New technology has been implemented to track animal movements across scales and we have taken part in several new collaborative projects. Christina, Caroline and Helena all support us by coordinating communication, meetings and our web site. Peter and Anne help with financial matters. Thank You All for this excellent support and work! Thanks also to the old and new CAnMove Board for Your great support to the program in 2014.

Many research projects which have received funding from CAnMove is now paying off with new interesting data. At the upcoming conference in January, more detailed reports will be given from the projects so please remember to sign up for the conference.

We have further received funding for an information/ E-book project, which has started with excellent speed and engagement from our PhD students and postdocs as well as Aron our photographer. Caroline is doing an excellent job coordinating the project, which has resulted in a large bulk of text and school exercisers for students age 12-16. I am very excited to support the development of the project and see the outcome next year.

I look forward to be part of and stimulate new scientific endevours resulting from the enormous creativity, interactions and engagement among members within and outside CAnMove.

Thank You all for your work and contributions to CAnMove in 2014!

I wish you all a relaxed Christmas Holiday and a successful New Year! See you back in 2015!

Susanne

PhD positions on bird and insect migration

Two PhD opportunities within the frame of ENRAM (“European Network for the Radar surveillance of Animal Movement”) has been announced.
One in Switzerland:
 “Temporal and spatially explicit forecast-model for broad-front bird migration across Switzerland based on radar surveillance”.
The other at Rothamstead/Lancaster: "Changing patterns of insect migration studied with a network of weather radars."

Two different Stable Isotope Short Courses at the University of Utah in 2015

There will be two different Stable Isotope Short Courses at the University of Utah in 2015:

Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry and Ecology, June 15-26, 2015

Isotopes in Spatial Ecology and Biogeochemistry, June 15-26, 2015

https://itce.utah.edu/courses.html  

We are pleased to open the application period for the 2015 Stable Isotope Short Courses at the University of Utah. In addition to the 20th annual offering of the Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry and Ecology Course (aka “Iso-Camp”), emphasizing fundamental environmental and biological theory underlying isotope fractionation processes and a broad spectrum of ecological and environmental applications, we are excited about the 3rd offering of the companion course, Isotopes in Spatial Ecology and Biogeochemistry (aka “The SPATIAL Short Course”), focused on large datasets, spatial analysis and modeling, and scaling with isotopic data.

Both classes will be limited-enrollment, multi-instructor lecture (morning) and laboratory (afternoon) short courses.  The courses are targeted to graduate students and postdoctoral investigators interested in learning more about the applications of stable isotopes at natural abundance levels to environmental, biogeochemical, marine, and ecological studies.  A limited number of lecture-only slots will be reserved for postdocs and faculty looking to gain exposure to scientific and technical course content without the full immersion experience offered by the full lecture+lab sequence.  The courses will:

1)  be offered at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City

2)  be limited to 25-27 participants in order to maximize interaction and access to laboratory resources; an additional 5 openings for the lecture-only course will be made available for postdocs and faculty

3)  consist of a morning lecture/discussion and an afternoon laboratory; each course will feature ~17 instructors, experts selected from across the country for their breadth of experience and for their interest in teaching and interacting with students

4)  include a hands-on laboratory experience each day. 

For Iso-Camp the laboratory experiences will include full access and use of ThermoElectron isotope ratio mass spectrometers and Picarro cavity-ring down spectrometers. The IRMS is equipped with elemental analyzers, continuous flow capacities, GC, TCEA, pre-con, laser, common-acid-bath. Available also are vacuum preparation lines for organic and inorganic compounds of biological and environmental interest. 

For the SPATIAL short course students will work with Picarro CRDS analyzers and a range of geospatial data management and modeling environments, including MySQL, ArcGIS, IsoMAP, R, and various research software packages developed and used by the instructors, their students, and collaborators.

Many of the evenings in both courses will be set aside for discussions of current research interests, group dinners and additional talks. There will also be opportunities for social events in the nearby Wasatch Mountains.

Typically our applicants have come from all across the United States as well as from many different foreign countries.  We select students with a diversity of academic interests, geographical diversity, and research experiences in mind. We seek students who are interested in learning broadly about stable isotope applications and in interacting with other students and faculty.  We encourage applications from members of underrepresented groups. Past participants have had backgrounds in disciplines including animal and plant physiology, ecology and ecosystem science, biogeochemistry, anthropology, atmospheric science, marine science, oceanography, paleontology, forensic science, industry, and geology.

Applications will be accepted until February 6, 2015. Application forms for both courses can be reached through the webpage https://itce.utah.edu/apply.html.  We will notify applicants by the last week of February 2015 regarding acceptance into the course and how to begin planning for lodging arrangements, tuition payments, reading materials, etc.

We will be offering a limited number of participant support awards to offset expenses related to participation in the courses. If you are interested in being considered for one of the awards, additional information beyond the initial application is required. Details are posted on the application website. We will announce recipients by the last week of February 2015, as well.

On behalf of the other instructors who participate in these courses from our campus as well as from across (and beyond!) the United States, let us say that we look forward to your application and encourage you to explore the program information on our website.

Happy Holidays.

Gabe Bowen, Thure Cerling, and Jim Ehleringer

Ecology of Animal Migration course 2015 - put this date in your calender!

 

 

Lost and Found: A Science Symposium about Navigation

Two weeks ago, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study at Harvard University held their annual science symposium - this time focusing on the challenging topic of navigation and way-finding. "By bringing together experts in human cognitive neuroscience and neural computation, animal life science, anthropology and culture, space science, current and future technology, and emergency management" the Radcliffe Institute wanted to conduct a broad, cross-disciplinary investigation about way-finding.

One of the speakers was CAnMove's Susanne Åkesson who contributed with the animal navigation aspect - talking about her turtle and albatross research. Watch it here!

The symposium was later written about in both Harvard Gazette and Venitism.

BOU Conference: "Birds in time and space: avian tracking and remote sensing"

This spring conference in Leicester, UK might be of interest to some. The conference will highlight the role of telemetry in understanding the ecology and behaviour of free-living wild birds. March 31st - April 2nd 2015.

Re-launch of Action Group

Today we re-launched the CAnMove Geolocator Action Group! We were an enthusiastic group of 9 CAnMovians, with diverse interests in geolocators/ light-loggers. Our group included people studying swifts, nightjars, great reed-warblers, geese, lapwings, guillemots, great snipes, golden plovers, ... .

Today's meeting was to discuss how we will use the Action Group. Our main decisions were to have a monthly meeting, and to form an email list. Possible themes for future meetings are likely to include, methods to analyse geolocator data, the use of new sensors (accelerometers, wet-dry, etc), and optimal attachment methods for different species.

The email list will be used both to announce upcoming meetings, but also more as a forum where we can share new papers, and ask questions (e.g. 'has anyone used the R package X before?', 'What device would you recommend for use on species Y?')

Our next meeting is to be at either the end of November or beginning of December. This is likely to include both an introduction from one of the companies producing light-loggers (Biotrack), and a short presentation from Tom about how he has been analysing geolocator data for guillemots.

If you would like to join the email list, please email/ talk to Tom Evans.

/Tom

Grants from the Swedish Research Council

Congratulations to CAnMove PIs Christer Brönmark and Bengt Hansson who both got a four-year grant from the Swedish Research Council for their projects: "Defence on demand: procimate processes, personality and parasites" and " Understanding the evolution of sex chromosomes, sex-biased gene expression and sexual antagonism in vertebrates: new insights from a recently discovered neo-sex chromosome in songbirds". To VRs site.

Minisymposium 6 nov: “Genomics and adaptations in diverging populations” and Thesis defence 7th of November

Thursday 6 November 2014 

Location: Red lecture hall, Ecology Building 

14: 00-14: 30 Allison Shultz, Harvard University, USA 

Phylogeography and genomic signatures of pathogen-mediated selection using genome-wide diachronic comparisons in the House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) 

14: 40-15: 10 CAnMove seminar by Kristen Ruegg, University of California, Santa Cruz & Los Angeles. Lessons from population genomics on the Causes and Consequences of migratory connectivity 

15: 20-15: 40 Coffee 

15: 40-16: 10 Bill Cresco, University of Oregon, USA 

Deep genome architecture influences Recent three pine Stickleback evolution 

16: 20-16: 50 Kerstin Johannesson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 

Parallel evolution of snail phenotypes - To What Extent Does molecular evolution repeat itself? 

Friday 7 November 2014 

Location: Blue Lecture Hall, Ecology Building 

09: 30-12: 00 Thesis defense by Max Lundberg, opponent Bill Cresco 

Genomic analyzes of migratory divides in the willow warbler

Photo: Andreas Trepte

Introduction Course for Using Databases , 3 – 7 of November 2014

Geneco will together with CAnMove and PlantLink give a one-week introduction using databases for data mining and storage on 3-7 of November. While the databases can store many different types of data, the examples will be focused on genomics and transcriptomics data and how to efficiently combine results from such large datasets.

 

No previous knowledge of databases is required, but a basic understanding of genomics and/or transcriptomics data is preferable.

 

The week will cover lectures in the morning followed by exercises and will cover the following topics:

1. Introduction to the course book.

2. Relational databases and simple queries (SQL).

3. Introduction to biological databases

4. Creating and populating your own database

5. Advanced SQL queries

6. Database design

 

Possibly we will finish there course by discussing how to create databases for individual projects.

The course will be held at Lund University, Ecology Building.

 

 

Sign up for the course by emailing me: dag.ahren@biol.lu.se

 

Deadline for applying to the course is 20 October.

Bio-logging in Strasbourg

A rather big group of CAnMovians took part in the 5^th Bio-logging Science Symposium, 22-26 September in Strasbourg, France. Susanne Åkesson had a talk about the Common swift studies and Tom Evans (Lesser black-backed gull foraging flight), Jannie Linnebjerg (Brünnich’s guillemot migration) and Götz Eichhorn (Lapwings with geolocators) contributed to the poster sessions. Andreas Nord and Fredrik Andreasson, new PhD student affiliated to CAnMove, dived into the field of body-temperature measurements, (Andreas even co-arranged a workshop on this subject). Johan Bäckman and Arne Andersson from the tech lab sneaked around among the 400 participants and 15 commercial exhibitors to try to figure out what the next innovation in bio-logger design will be.

The bio-logging symposium started off as a meeting ground for marine animal scientists, and the majority of the contributions are still within the field of whales, sharks and seals; animals that can carry huge amounts of sensors without getting problems with over-weight, a luxury situation compared to many of the projects in CAnMove.

There is a strong trend towards using accelerometers on all sorts of animals, either as a proxy for energy expenditure (the acronyms ODBA & VeDBA were heard at numerous occasions) or for monitoring behavior (often in conjunction with other types of sensors such as depth meters and gyroscopes). It seems like many researchers are working hard to designing accurate analysis tools for this kind of data. We will probably have to wait a little longer before good tools for general use are available.

Argos satellite telemetry is still the major backbone for transferring data from the animals to the researchers, although there are some alternatives coming up (e.g. using the mobile phone network).

We also learned that Strasbourg is a charming city and the traditional Alsatian dish Choucroute Garnie is nice but very filling!

//Arne Andersson

Mis-match between chironomid movement to the surface and waterfowl reproduction

Photo by Mattias Ekvall

 

 

In a recent issue of ESA´s (Ecological Society of America) open access journal ECOSPHERE http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/ES14-00133.1

we report that the emergence and movement of chironomids from the sediment of lakes to the surface occurs earlier and in one strong boost in a future climate scenario. Historically the emergence rate of chironomids (Fjädermyggor; see photo) has occurred over a period of more than a month each spring and has thereby served as a food source for waterfowl chicks, which are completely dependent on this resource. We also show that the fundamental change in timing and maximum rate of emergence of chironomids will likely lead to that waterfowl will not be able to adjust their breeding season to match the future scenario of insect emergence, resulting in a mis-match in consumer-resource relations. Likely this will lead to a considerable reduction in waterfowl abundance and biodiversity in a future climate change scenario. /Lars-Anders Hansson et al.

 

 

 

2015 Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Granada 22-27 February 2015

If interested in phenology and evolutionary adaptations to seasonality, please consider the session we are organizing at the 2015 Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Granada 22-27 February 2015:

http://www.sgmeet.com/aslo/granada2015/sessionschedule.asp?SessionID=029

 

We invite you to submit an abstract. Deadline for abstract submission is 10 October.

CAnMove research on Naturmorgon

If you're an early bird, don't miss this Saturday's "Naturmorgon" about insect tracking with laser radar.

06.10 on radio P1!

Book release party & pizza night!

Last Thursday, almost 40 CAnMovians showed up to celebrate the release of the book "Movement across scales" - a joint effort by several CAnMove researchers and one of the programme milestones. Thanks to everybody who contributed, and especially to Lasse who has done a terrific job editing the book!
There was plenty of pizza to go around, and it was nice that so many stayed for drinks and chatting!

Apart from celebrating, people were also asked to give some input to the future challanges of the programme. This autumn one of the important tasks for the board will be to set the direction for CAnMoves' next coming years - taking the feedback from the half-time evaluation as well as your input into account. All ideas and comments from this evening were collected and will be handed over to the board for further discussions!


 

 

/Helena

New CAnMove Board

I wish to thank the CAnMove members who now step back form serving CAnMove in the board, Staffan Bensch, Lars-Anders Hansson and Dennis Hasselquist. Thanks for your most valuable and appreciated contributions to the CAnMove program and for supportive years with CAnMove activities.

As new members in I wish to welcome Christer Brönmark and Bengt Hansson, both PIs in CAnMove and with research interests in partial migration in fish and population dynamics and in landscape genetics, inbreeding and dispersal among other topics.

Thanks and Very welcome!

I look forward to work with the new CAnMove Board as we step in to a most important period in CAnMove where we will dedicate time to look into the future and to create long-lasting platforms and actions of value for many members.

Warm wishes,
Susanne

Animal Migration - a journal for researchers interested in animal movement

Greetings colleagues,

Please permit me to introduce myself - I am the new editor of a journal which should be of interest to everyone reading this. Animal Migration, published by De Groyter, is a relatively new open-access journal that, as the name suggests, is devoted to publishing studies on the biology of migratory animals and their movements. The journal has only been underway for a little more than a year and a half, but already it has published works ranging from geolocator accuracy in bird migration studies, to butterfly wing morphology, and non-volant modes of migration in insects. The journal is open to all subjects within this discipline, including migratory behavior, flight mechanics, navigation, as well as methodological techniques for the study of animal migration. The journal accepts research articles as well as review papers. Collectively, this journal fills an important niche by providing a forum for researchers like us who study animal movement and migration.

I would like to invite you to submit your next paper to our journal.
Authors of published papers receive the following benefits:

- Open Access to your article for all interested readers,
- No publication charge for articles published in 2014,
- Fast and constructive peer review provided by recognized experts in the field,
- Convenient, web-based paper submission and tracking system – Editorial Manager (http://www.editorialmanager.com/ami/) ,
- High-quality electronic publication technology,
- Immediate online publication of articles,
- Free language-correction services for non-English-speaking authors of accepted papers
- And finally, all papers are extensively promoted with an individually-tailored press release, that is sent to all major news wires

The journal also boasts an impressive collection of distinguished
scientists who serve on the editorial advisory board, listed below:

Susanne Åkesson, Lund University, Sweden
Jason Chapman, Rothamsted Research, West Common, Harpenden, UK
John M. Fryxell, University of Guelph, Canada
Christopher G. Guglielmo, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Graeme Hays, Swansea University, UK
Anders Hedenström, Lund University, Sweden
Keith A. Hobson, Science and Technology Branch, Environment Canada, Canada
Felix Liechti, Swiss Ornithological Institute, Sempach , Switzerland
Kenneth J. Lohmann, Center for Galapagos Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Peter Marra, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, National Zoological
Park, Washington, USA
Frank R. Moore, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, USA
Rachel Muheim, Lund University, Sweden
Martin Wikelski, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Seewiesen, Germany

For more information on the journal, including submitting manuscripts, see the journal website at http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ami

I hope to see your paper soon.

Sincerely,
Andy Davis, PhD
University of Georgia, USA
Editor, Animal Migration

Susanne Åkesson interviewed on German radio

Yesterday, Sunday August 31st, Susanne Åkesson was interviewed on the radio; German Deutschlandradio-Redaktion Forschung aktuell, in a program about  high tech in field biology where she talked about CAnMove.
Read all about it and listen to the program (only in German though) following this link!

Book budding: Animal Movement Across Scales on the go!

 

 

As previously announced the CAnMove book “Animal Movement Across Scales” has left our hands,  moved into the production stage and will soon be available for purchase. However, Oxford University Press is however efficient and decided to launch our book already at the proof stage. The photo below was taken at their exhibition case at the yearly meeting of ESA (Ecological Society of America) in California. Although it was just at the proof stage, it had at least got a price tag! /L-A

PhD student Kajsa Warfvinge spoke at Malmöfestivalen

Insect aerodynamics PhD student Kajsa Warfvinge was the first person on stage to give a talk on the Street Science event at Malmöfestivalen Tuesday the 19th of August.

The event was launched this year by Lund University, and proved to attract the interest from passing people as well as collegues and friends of the speakers.

Nine researchers had a chance to talk about what they really do for five short minutes each.

Kajsa´s talk was entitled "Disco-smoke and lasers reveal how insects fly", in which she addressed questions in insect aerodynamics. Nellie Linander from Functional Zoology, followed and complemented Kajsa´s talk by speaking about the bumble bee steering system.

Very well done, Kajsa!

Sten K Johnson Price Ceremony

Let´s go back a few months, just before vacation.

The 17th of June, Susanne Åkesson recieved a project stipend from Sten K Johnson Foundation in a ceremony at Lund University Ekonomihögskola.

The prize money is funding the E-book project currently produced in CanMove. The E-book,  "Butterfly wings, bat radar and sea monsters - this is how the creatures move" will be a informative and inspirational book for high school students in Sweden -  a narrative about our PhD students and post-docs and the scientific work we do in CanMove. It is estimated to be finished by spring 2015.

 In the company of 60 other stipend winners, you may find Susanne as person nr. 9 from the right, front row.

CAnMove Newsletter Autumn 2014

CAnMove Newsletter Autumn 2014

 

Swedish Research Council Evaluation

June 16^th, the decision by Swedish Research Council (VR) was communicated, CAnMove and most other Linnaeus programs funded 2008 receive continued level of funding. It was a time to celebrate and to continue our plans for the coming period! There were some limited changes, and interestingly enough there were both cut-downs and increased funding within our evaluation group in Natural Sciences. CAnMove are grateful for the positive evaluation, continued support and look forward to future program activities. The complete report is available for down-loading at VR home page.

All in all, the Linnaeus centers show well-functioning organization and many produce world-leading research. CAnMove is certainly one of them, and we can be proud of our achievements. The panel wrote: "CAnMove has undertaken excellent and innovative research, making use of modern technological developments to fundamentally advance the field." It was further high-lighted for our centre that we have excellent outreach performance, and have started several new infrastructure initiatives. The outreach activities is continuing with the recently funded E-book project involving CAnMove PhD students. We further were advised to look into recruiting modelling expertise, to approach the industry, and to re-allocate funding to stimulate research projects in focus areas involving graduate students. There are many possibilities and by recent developments and initiatives within the CAnMove program, we foresee a bright future and hopefully a long establishment of the CAnMove centre and its research activities at Lund University. An exciting autumn and winter is coming up where we will be able to explore results from successful field campaigns and new infrastructures tested in the field.

 

Book Project

A more than two year long journey for us all with the book “Animal Movement Across Scales” is now over as the corrected proofs of all chapters are now handed in to Oxford University Press and the process is now in their hands. We can be proud of managing to perform this gigantic task according to plan, which should mean that the book will be on the shelf in September.

So, thanks for all your efforts and let us hope the book will serve as inspiration for others and kick off new and creative research!

 

Field work continues into the autumn
The Swedish summer has been warm and productive for most of the CAnMove researchers. Several PI:s, PhD students and post-docs have been working through the summer. The autumn migration is in full action leading to field campaigns lasting still some more months.

 

Technical Lab Q1 report

Microloggers
The micro-logger is currently under development and getting lighter and thinner than ever before. With battery, it currently weigh about 1 gram. This 4^th version has a light sensor, as well as other new features. The hardware was successfully finished for the field campaign this summer and was used in several research projects. The new device will be able to distinguish between birds´ constant rest, constant flight and other behavior that is not resting nor flying. Over 50 loggers are currently being placed on birds in the field.

The database is under development
A production database (PD) – hosted by LDC – is in place. The data model for tracking radar is ready

and data from Falsterbo has been loaded. The loading of data from Lund and Abisko is awaiting the scrutiny of data. The data models for light logger data and satellite telemetry were almost ready but
the decision was taken to start over with a more general, flexible data model for both types of data.
This model is expected to also cope with all kinds of data loggers and all combinations of sensors on them. The work to build a test web service for data transfer to WRAM has commenced.
A presentation on the CAnMove database work was held at the end of February. An interview round
with all stakeholders is about halfway through.

 

 

New symposias planned in 2015

Local biosensor-meeting

International symposium: Animal modelling bridging the gap between modelling and tracking data

 

The CAnMove E-book project received funding from the Sten K Johnson Foundation

Newly established (2012) Sten K Johnson Foundation has decided to fund a planned CAnMove e-book entitled; "Butterfly wings, bat radar and sea
monsters - this is how and why the creatures move”. The book is an aim to inspire and draw high school students to natural sciences, and animal tracking in particular.


We received 150.000 SEK at a ceremony the 17 of June at the Sten K Johnson Center at School of Economics and Management Lund University in June. We are of course honored and excited! The production of the book has now started with engagement from the young research community of CAnMove.


Film competition

The prize: A high-definition action camera GoPro Hero, latest model is 4, and is out this summer. The GoPro has amazing HD-image quality and comes with a ton of features. Basically, you go on a real ride with the camera strapped to your helmet/body, film/photograph your adventure and share it immediately to social medias.

This is what you have to do to compete: Make a film of about 1 minute of your fieldwork. You can use a smart phone or more sophisticated gear, as long as the content is interesting/fun/exciting…There is a possibility to borrow a small Panasonic Full HD-camera from Christina Rengefors´ office (3rd floor, room B364).

The best way to ensure great material, is to produce a lot of films and choose a few that you like. You can send as many films as you like to us! We encourage you not to feel pressured into doing something too ambitious. Have faith that your films are good enough.

Jury: We will probably have some kind of web-voting where all of you have a chance to vote for the top-3 films. When voting is over, we will announce the winner later this autumn.

All films sent to CAnMove can be used in the CAnMove blog and on our YouTube-channel to spread information and inspiration about science.

Send your films to: Caroline.bolmeson@biol.lu.se

 

Citizen and Science Workshop 24 of April - recap

Crowdsourcing data from happy amateur scientists is not new, but develops very fast right now thanks to tools (smartphones, internet, etc.) and virtual communities.

The 1-day international workshop: Åke Lindström, PI in CAnMove, arranged a workshop the 24 of April, to address the current development and challenges with crowdsourcing data.

 

In case you missed the excellent Citizen Science workshop, keep on reading or go to:

www.youtube.com/user/BiodivLU

There was so much useful information for scientists aspiring to crowd source data, during this workshop. Therefore, we have compiled tips from a few of the speakers here.

 

Jonathan Silverman works with iSpot, which is a site and tool online. 150 organizations work with iSpot and most users are students and universities. You can upload an image of any plant or animal to iSpot, and get almost instantaneous answer to what species it is. This is crowdsourcing for anybody. iSpot helps people learn. Everything is geo-referenced as well, except for species on IUCN Red List of threatened species (that are geo-referenced in an area, but not to the precise sighting).

 

Helen Roy – the landscape of citizen science, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK

One of the raison-détre for the Ladybird Survey UK, is to record ladybirds across the British Isles, linking their distribution to climate change. Helen is an enthusiastic bug scientist, and being very interested in crowdsourcing for science, she eventually wrote “Guide to Citizen Science” – UK Environmental Observation Framework. Best tips: Clarity of goals for the people joining the crowdsourcing project is essential! Explicit, simple aims for the participants. No need to argue; the Ladybird Survey UK has been extremely successful. Important to identify and understand target participants (for example children) so that we can shape the crowdsourcing accordingly.

 

Kjell Bolmgren – Turning passion into practice, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

For 73 years, Gunnar has been writing his observations about the weather and the flowering time point for 25 different species of flowers. Not surprisingly, Gunnar is a farmer. Kjell Bolmgren from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, says it is useful to turn to some groups in society that already has done some crowdsourcing already. Gunnar´s data ended up in a publication in International Journal of Biometeorology in 2013.

Kjell also points out that it can be useful to work together with authorities that need the data. He explains; “The crowdsourcing work is no longer dependent on a few dedicated enthusiasts.”

Having a professional communicator in his family, Kjell gets a lot of tips for succeeding with crowdsourcing. People need motivation and a purpose to help scientists gather data (climate change for example). It needs to be convenient and simple for them. Perhaps they can do some sourcing at spots that they pass by every day. They need accurate instructions and some support (perhaps Facebook).  

Best tips: Let people follow different protocols to engage on different levels. Let them have ONE focus.

 

Åke Lindström – Swedish Bird Survey
Swedish Bird Survery (http://www.zoo.ekol.lu.se/birdmonitoring/Eng/index.htm) has been counting birds all over Sweden for 30 years. “We ask a lot from our surveyors. It is so important with the sampling design and data collection”, Åke says. Raise the awareness about the scientific method! How? Popular science writing, lectures, teach at courses, year reports to surveyors, workshops for surveyors, community, project webpage.

Åke sees a drawback with “the old scheme” used in Swedish Bird Survey: people count birds where they live and where it is nice to watch. Therefore new scheme was established in 1996. There are new fixed routes that takes about 6 hours to walk. 716 routes exist in Sweden, and 501 routes were counted in 2013.

Best tips: Make your survey small. There is a remarkable strength of a small survey. An example of this is how we get a good idea of how people will vote in election polls. Surveys done for elections are very small, but give an immense information.

 

This was just a few of the speakers! Take a look at the Youtube-link to see more.

 

Equality Workshop

Achieving equality: What it takes to understand and manage diversity

Friday 4 of April, CAnMove organized a workshop on equality. About 30 curious CAnMove members (and a few from other departments) spent the afternoon thinking about and discussing this important but potentially complicated concept. We were guided by Kerstin Fritsches and Stephen Evill from PostDocTraining.

 

During the workshop we touched upon the many different aspects of the social environment that can affect equality in a research environment such as CAnMove: leadership, how the things we say and write are perceived by others, understanding and accepting the different personalities we have around us, dealing with cultural differences, and giving as well as receiving feed-back. Lectures were mixed with small exercises in an inspiring and relaxed way. 

The participants could test whether they are practical or creative personalities and we got the flavour of how it would be to work in a super-feminine cultural environment or, at the other extreme, a high-power distance culture with an all-mighty leader. No doubt there are many exciting aspects to dive into as far as equality is concerned and how a research environment will reach its full potential. There are definitely themes for more equality workshops. The workshop and afternoon ended with a nice buffet.

Linneaus meeting in Strömstad

In the beginning of April (9-11), a group of CAnMovians visited Strömstad for a joint meeting with one of sister Linnaeus Centre’s from Gothenburg University, The Linnaeus Centre for Marine Evolutionary Biology (CeMEB). Invited to the meeting was also the "Butterfly Group" from Stockholm University.

Between Wednesday and Friday we could enjoy both a poster session and exiting lectures with extremely diverse themes. For example, the participants learned more about Insect life cycle genomics and Diapause, local adaptation in marine snails and aerodynamic performance in flying birds.

The participants also got to experience a guided boat trip to the beautiful Koster archipelago. We thank CeMEB for the hospitality and a very nice arrangement. We also hope that we will eventually have the opportunity to invite them to Lund!