Workshops
RCUK 2023 will feature four workshops, hosted at the Frederick Douglass Centre, Newcastle University, on Friday afternoon (8th December, 1-5 pm). Find details for each workshop below.
Attendance at workshops will be limited, and these must be individually registered through the following links:
• AI for Coral Reefs --- SOLD OUT
• Grant writing for early career researchers --- CANCELLED
• Reef Restoration and Rehabilitation
• Seeing like a social scientist
Seeing like a 'social scientist'
Sophie Standen, Eva Maire, Antonio Allegretti, Christina Hicks (tbc), Lancaster Environment Centre
The political, cultural, and socio-economic effects of conservation measures worldwide are often fiercely debated among researchers and practitioners. Social scientists have analysed these effects by looking at the political underpinnings, the role of scientific uncertainty, and questions of power and injustice in conservation. This workshop will introduce and discuss the many different philosophies that underpin conservation as seen by social scientists. Using example case studies from different regions of the world, it will teach you how to approach conservation issues from a critical social science perspective and will also show you why this matters for your own research or work.
What you will learn:
Key concepts: We will cover the foundations of the different philosophies of conservation. We will also discuss why these matter, and how to approach issues in conservation and/or your own work from a social science perspective.
Set up: Please fill out this survey upon registration before commencing workshop: https://www.futureconservation.org/surveys/oSlgLUBuv5BZUkrYUxqeHQ/responses/new
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn the foundations of critical social science for conservation. The hope is this could become a skillset you develop further and to hold in your arsenal when addressing future coral reef conservation challenges. We especially encourage attendees who have a desire to incorporate more of a critical, social scientific understanding to their own research or work.
What you will need:
Your instructors:
Sophie Standen: A human geography/anthropology PhD student at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster university. Her research focusses on furthering social and political understandings regarding fish in food systems, to enable a more equitable approach to fisheries management and fisheries food systems.
Eva Maire: Eva Maire has been a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster Environment Centre since 2019, her research tackles issues in coral reef systems using both ecological and social-ecological approaches with a focus on understanding how climate change impacts food and nutrition security in the tropics.
Antonio Allegretti: Anthropologist and researcher at Lancaster Environment Centre. Antonio works on governance of natural resources, rurality, and markets in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Christina Hicks tbc: Christina is an Environmental Social Scientist interested in the relationships individuals and societies form with nature; how these relationships shape people’s social, environmental, and health outcomes; and how they create sustainable livelihood choices. Christina is a Professor in Lancaster University’s Environment Centre.
The political, cultural, and socio-economic effects of conservation measures worldwide are often fiercely debated among researchers and practitioners. Social scientists have analysed these effects by looking at the political underpinnings, the role of scientific uncertainty, and questions of power and injustice in conservation. This workshop will introduce and discuss the many different philosophies that underpin conservation as seen by social scientists. Using example case studies from different regions of the world, it will teach you how to approach conservation issues from a critical social science perspective and will also show you why this matters for your own research or work.
What you will learn:
Key concepts: We will cover the foundations of the different philosophies of conservation. We will also discuss why these matter, and how to approach issues in conservation and/or your own work from a social science perspective.
Set up: Please fill out this survey upon registration before commencing workshop: https://www.futureconservation.org/surveys/oSlgLUBuv5BZUkrYUxqeHQ/responses/new
- Introduction to case studies and overall themes
- Short exercises regarding ideas about conservation
- Breakout groups and discussion
- BREAK
- Presentation of groupwork and discussion
- WRAP UP - Short wrap up exercises
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn the foundations of critical social science for conservation. The hope is this could become a skillset you develop further and to hold in your arsenal when addressing future coral reef conservation challenges. We especially encourage attendees who have a desire to incorporate more of a critical, social scientific understanding to their own research or work.
What you will need:
- Pens and paper will be provided.
Your instructors:
Sophie Standen: A human geography/anthropology PhD student at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster university. Her research focusses on furthering social and political understandings regarding fish in food systems, to enable a more equitable approach to fisheries management and fisheries food systems.
Eva Maire: Eva Maire has been a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster Environment Centre since 2019, her research tackles issues in coral reef systems using both ecological and social-ecological approaches with a focus on understanding how climate change impacts food and nutrition security in the tropics.
Antonio Allegretti: Anthropologist and researcher at Lancaster Environment Centre. Antonio works on governance of natural resources, rurality, and markets in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Christina Hicks tbc: Christina is an Environmental Social Scientist interested in the relationships individuals and societies form with nature; how these relationships shape people’s social, environmental, and health outcomes; and how they create sustainable livelihood choices. Christina is a Professor in Lancaster University’s Environment Centre.
Reef restoration and rehabilitation
Dr James Guest & Coralassist Lab at Newcastle University
Reef restoration and rehabilitation aims to accelerate recovery of reefs that have been degraded by human activities. Restoration and rehabilitation have been practiced for several decades on reefs, but mostly at small scales to tackle localised disturbances such as ship groundings and destructive fishing. However, in the last few years ecological restoration projects have become more widespread on reefs and the science of reef restoration ecology has received considerable attention. There are now ambitions to dramatically upscale restoration to tackle global scale disturbances such as mass coral bleaching. Nonetheless, both the practice and science are still in their infancy and there are relatively few well documented examples of successful reef restoration initiatives. It is likely that restoration and rehabilitation will become increasingly popular as management tools in the Anthropocene, therefore it is critical for coral reef scientists, particularly early career researchers, to have a clear grasp of what reef restoration is (and is not). The aim of this half day workshop is to introduce reef restoration and rehabilitation, to discuss the current state of the science and practice and to provoke discussion on what key developments need to take place for reef restoration and rehabilitation to have a meaningful impact in the Anthropocene.
What you will learn:
Key concepts: We will cover the basic concepts that underpin coral restoration and rehabilitation. This will include defining the key terms used in the field of reef restoration ecology. For example, we will distinguish between restoration ecology and ecological restoration (and explain why this distinction is important), we will discuss the differences between restoration and rehabilitation and between proactive and reactive management. We will also provide an overview of the main techniques currently being used for reef restoration and rehabilitation outlining their strengths and weaknesses. We will provide some case studies of both successes and failures from the field. Finally, we will discuss both the costs and potential benefits of coral reef restoration and rehabilitation to give workshop participants a clearer understanding what is required to meaningfully upscale restorative interventions.
Set up: The workshops will be delivered as a series of short talks, lectures and practical exercises followed by discussion within breakout groups.
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn about concepts and techniques in coral reef restoration and rehabilitation. We hope that at the end, participants will have a clearer appreciation of the challenges involved in successfully restoring coral reef ecosystems.
What you will need:
There are no pre-requirements apart from being willing to learn and contribute. Feel free to bring a notebook and pen, but these will be provided.
Your instructors:
Dr James Guest has been conducting research on coral reefs for over 25 years. He is currently the principal investigator of the Coralassist Lab at Newcastle University (https://www.coralassistlab.org/). Other instructors are to be confirmed but will involve members of the Coralassist Lab and experts on coral reef restoration and rehabilitation.
Reef restoration and rehabilitation aims to accelerate recovery of reefs that have been degraded by human activities. Restoration and rehabilitation have been practiced for several decades on reefs, but mostly at small scales to tackle localised disturbances such as ship groundings and destructive fishing. However, in the last few years ecological restoration projects have become more widespread on reefs and the science of reef restoration ecology has received considerable attention. There are now ambitions to dramatically upscale restoration to tackle global scale disturbances such as mass coral bleaching. Nonetheless, both the practice and science are still in their infancy and there are relatively few well documented examples of successful reef restoration initiatives. It is likely that restoration and rehabilitation will become increasingly popular as management tools in the Anthropocene, therefore it is critical for coral reef scientists, particularly early career researchers, to have a clear grasp of what reef restoration is (and is not). The aim of this half day workshop is to introduce reef restoration and rehabilitation, to discuss the current state of the science and practice and to provoke discussion on what key developments need to take place for reef restoration and rehabilitation to have a meaningful impact in the Anthropocene.
What you will learn:
Key concepts: We will cover the basic concepts that underpin coral restoration and rehabilitation. This will include defining the key terms used in the field of reef restoration ecology. For example, we will distinguish between restoration ecology and ecological restoration (and explain why this distinction is important), we will discuss the differences between restoration and rehabilitation and between proactive and reactive management. We will also provide an overview of the main techniques currently being used for reef restoration and rehabilitation outlining their strengths and weaknesses. We will provide some case studies of both successes and failures from the field. Finally, we will discuss both the costs and potential benefits of coral reef restoration and rehabilitation to give workshop participants a clearer understanding what is required to meaningfully upscale restorative interventions.
Set up: The workshops will be delivered as a series of short talks, lectures and practical exercises followed by discussion within breakout groups.
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn about concepts and techniques in coral reef restoration and rehabilitation. We hope that at the end, participants will have a clearer appreciation of the challenges involved in successfully restoring coral reef ecosystems.
What you will need:
There are no pre-requirements apart from being willing to learn and contribute. Feel free to bring a notebook and pen, but these will be provided.
Your instructors:
Dr James Guest has been conducting research on coral reefs for over 25 years. He is currently the principal investigator of the Coralassist Lab at Newcastle University (https://www.coralassistlab.org/). Other instructors are to be confirmed but will involve members of the Coralassist Lab and experts on coral reef restoration and rehabilitation.
artificial intelligence (AI) for coral reefs
Ben Williams, University College London
Siciliy Fiennes, University of Leeds
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere in the news right now and increasingly being applied across scientific fields, including conservation. Global organizations such as the UN and WEF recognise AI as one of the most in demand skills across the next few years. This workshop is designed to help coral reef scientists who are beginners in this area learn the key concepts of machine learning and how to start using it in their projects.
What you will learn:
Key concepts: We will cover the foundations needed to begin working with AI. This will start by deciphering the many key and often overlapping terms and what they involve; machine learning, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, deep learning, computer vision and more. You will learn what kind of project and dataset each of these approaches is most suitable for as well as common pitfalls.
Set up: We will cover your choices when getting started, including softwares, frameworks, and tools to help. This includes the use of Google Collaboratory, a no-install needed version of Python from your web browser, where you can access free high performance computing resources. We will also cover how large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Github Copilot can accelerate your work using ‘prompt engineering’ for machine learning (or more broadly).
Problem sets: We will then run through basic machine learning problems using exemplar data collected from coral reefs. You will be guided through planning what kind of approach to use, how to process the data, train models and interpret these.
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn the foundations of machine learning. The hope is this could become a skillset you develop further and to hold in your arsenal when addressing future coral reef conservation challenges. We especially encourage attendees who have a project or dataset they believe could benefit from machine learning.
What you will need:
- Attendees will need to be comfortable with beginner to intermediate use of at least one programming language. This workshop will be delivered in Python. However, much of what will be taught can also be performed in R.
- Bring a laptop with Google Chrome and a spreadsheet manager (e.g Excel) installed.
- A Google Drive account with at least 3gb of space.
- Access to Google Collaboratory, see the getting started webpage here: https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index
- A free ChatGPT and/or Claude (by Anthropic) account.
Your instructors:
Ben Williams (He/Him): A PhD student at UCL and ZSL studying AI for coral reefs. Ben has worked on numerous projects using machine learning with a particular focus on acoustics, most recently at Google’s DeepMind team in San Francisco. Read more about Ben’s work on his webpage or twitter.
Sicily Fiennes (They/Them): A PhD student at the University of Leeds researching the Asian songbird trade, with a focus on machine learning and social sciences methods. They have been working on field based tools for songbird identification for 3 years. See Sicily's webpage here.
Siciliy Fiennes, University of Leeds
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere in the news right now and increasingly being applied across scientific fields, including conservation. Global organizations such as the UN and WEF recognise AI as one of the most in demand skills across the next few years. This workshop is designed to help coral reef scientists who are beginners in this area learn the key concepts of machine learning and how to start using it in their projects.
What you will learn:
Key concepts: We will cover the foundations needed to begin working with AI. This will start by deciphering the many key and often overlapping terms and what they involve; machine learning, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, deep learning, computer vision and more. You will learn what kind of project and dataset each of these approaches is most suitable for as well as common pitfalls.
Set up: We will cover your choices when getting started, including softwares, frameworks, and tools to help. This includes the use of Google Collaboratory, a no-install needed version of Python from your web browser, where you can access free high performance computing resources. We will also cover how large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Github Copilot can accelerate your work using ‘prompt engineering’ for machine learning (or more broadly).
Problem sets: We will then run through basic machine learning problems using exemplar data collected from coral reefs. You will be guided through planning what kind of approach to use, how to process the data, train models and interpret these.
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn the foundations of machine learning. The hope is this could become a skillset you develop further and to hold in your arsenal when addressing future coral reef conservation challenges. We especially encourage attendees who have a project or dataset they believe could benefit from machine learning.
What you will need:
- Attendees will need to be comfortable with beginner to intermediate use of at least one programming language. This workshop will be delivered in Python. However, much of what will be taught can also be performed in R.
- Bring a laptop with Google Chrome and a spreadsheet manager (e.g Excel) installed.
- A Google Drive account with at least 3gb of space.
- Access to Google Collaboratory, see the getting started webpage here: https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index
- A free ChatGPT and/or Claude (by Anthropic) account.
Your instructors:
Ben Williams (He/Him): A PhD student at UCL and ZSL studying AI for coral reefs. Ben has worked on numerous projects using machine learning with a particular focus on acoustics, most recently at Google’s DeepMind team in San Francisco. Read more about Ben’s work on his webpage or twitter.
Sicily Fiennes (They/Them): A PhD student at the University of Leeds researching the Asian songbird trade, with a focus on machine learning and social sciences methods. They have been working on field based tools for songbird identification for 3 years. See Sicily's webpage here.
Research Funding & Early Career Fellowships
Dr Jarlath McKenna, Senior Research Funding Development Manager, Newcastle University
Research funding is crucial for early career researchers as not only does it provide you with financial support but also plays a pivotal role in your professional development, career progression, and the quality and impact of your research contributions.
Securing research funding will allow you to pursue your own research interests and questions independently. This independence is crucial for developing your own research identity and expertise. It will enable you to compete in a competitive research environment and can open up opportunities for career advancement. These include networking, learning from experienced researchers, and gaining access to valuable resources and mentorship.
Applying for research funding usually involves writing a grant proposal, which is a valuable skill in academia and other research-related careers. The purpose of this workshop is to introduce research funding, with a particular focus on early career fellowships, and to explain what is needed to help you prepare for funding success!
What you will learn:
The workshop programme is as follows:
At the end of the workshop participants will be able to:
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn about research funding and is an early career fellowship is right for them. We hope that at the end, participants will have a better understanding of what it takes to make a successful research funding proposal.
What you will need:
There are no pre-requirements apart from being willing to learn and contribute.
Your instructors:
Dr Jarlath McKenna has been involved in research or research-support roles for over 20 years. He currently works in the Research Funding Development team at Newcastle University across a range of science disciplines to support both small and large-scale grant applications to major UK funders.
Research funding is crucial for early career researchers as not only does it provide you with financial support but also plays a pivotal role in your professional development, career progression, and the quality and impact of your research contributions.
Securing research funding will allow you to pursue your own research interests and questions independently. This independence is crucial for developing your own research identity and expertise. It will enable you to compete in a competitive research environment and can open up opportunities for career advancement. These include networking, learning from experienced researchers, and gaining access to valuable resources and mentorship.
Applying for research funding usually involves writing a grant proposal, which is a valuable skill in academia and other research-related careers. The purpose of this workshop is to introduce research funding, with a particular focus on early career fellowships, and to explain what is needed to help you prepare for funding success!
What you will learn:
The workshop programme is as follows:
- What is research funding?
- How to prepare for fellowship success
- Person, Project, Place
- Understanding your audience
- Grant-writing skills
- Learning from example
At the end of the workshop participants will be able to:
- Decide if a fellowship is right for them
- Search for funding opportunities
- Take steps to enhance their CV attributes
- Understand the components of a high-quality funding application
Target audience:
This workshop is aimed at early career researchers eager to learn about research funding and is an early career fellowship is right for them. We hope that at the end, participants will have a better understanding of what it takes to make a successful research funding proposal.
What you will need:
There are no pre-requirements apart from being willing to learn and contribute.
Your instructors:
Dr Jarlath McKenna has been involved in research or research-support roles for over 20 years. He currently works in the Research Funding Development team at Newcastle University across a range of science disciplines to support both small and large-scale grant applications to major UK funders.
