Survey Design - WGSA Workshop

Hello, Warnell! This week's WGSA Workshop will be on survey design focusing on human dimension and social sciences research. Sarah Horsley and Lauren Mullenbach will be leading the discussion. The workshop will be held in the Deans' Conference Room starting at 4:30 on Wednesday March 18th. Hope to see you there! A description of the discussion is below.

Ever have a grant application ask for outreach/education impacts and wonder how you're supposed to figure that out? Or just interested human dimensions research in general? We have the WGSA workshop for you! This survey design workshop will teach you the basics of creating surveys/questionnaires to use in research. We will look into the components of good surveys, tips for writing clear and concise questions, and the steps that are needed to make sure your survey is valid and reliable. 

WGSA Workshop - SDM

UPDATE: Files from this workshop can be accessed using the links below:

Presentation
Workshop Handout
Salamander SDM
Salamander SDM - Completed

This week's WGSA Workshop will be on the topic of Structured Decision Making (SDM), led by Tara Crawford and Brian Crawford. This workshop will take place Wednesday March 4th in the Dean's Conference Room at 4:00pm. A description of what will be covered is below.

Most natural resource management and conservation issues that we face today involve complex social-ecological interactions; diverse groups of people wanting different things, a variety of potential management/policy solutions under consideration, and uncertainties that impair our understanding of the systems we wish to manage and the outcomes of alternative management options. Structured Decision Making (SDM) is one approach used to decompose such decision problems through a series of steps that help identify which management or policy alternatives bring us closest to achieving our objectives. This workshop will briefly introduce the basic principles, steps, and uses of this approach for addressing natural resource issues. Participants will gain experience in SDM through a mock decision analysis in which each participant will play the role of a stakeholder in the context of a mock decision problem. We will quickly work through each step in the SDM process and ultimately arrive at a decision for managing a new (imaginary) species of salamander discovered to inhabit UGA’s Oconnee Forest. 

Things to do/download/read prior to workshop: Nothing. See you there!

2015 WGSA Symposium Proceedings

Thank you to everyone who presented, attended, and volunteered to help make this year's symposium a great success! The proceedings from the meeting are below.

glmmADMB - WGSA Workshop Series

UPDATE: presentation from workshop

This week, for the WGSA Workshop Series, Cassie Jansch will be discussing the R package glmmADMB. This workshop will be Wednesday March 25th at 4:00pm in the Dean's Conference Room.

The R software package {glmmADMB} allows for fitting generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) within the R interface with the power of AD Model Builder (a program that I will freely admit I don't understand) to a further extent than other packages such as {lme4} allow. For example, you can fit models with responses described by a negative binomial distribution that include multiple random effects with incorporated zero inflation. There are also a variety of response distributions (including Beta, truncated Poisson, Gamma,...) and link functions (log, logit, probit,...) at your beck and call. Familiarity with GLMs and GLMMs is helpful in learning how this package can work for you. To properly run {glmmADMB}, R package {R2admb} is required, and installing these two in advance will allow us to dive into the fun a little quicker!

install.packages("glmmADMB", repos="http://r-forge.r-project.org", type="source")​

install.packages("R2admb", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org")

Data files to download for the workshop:
intro_glmmadmb.R
countdata.csv

Please come by and check it out!

2015 Warnell Graduate Symposium

The Symposium starts tomorrow! This is one of the big academic events at Warnell that provides an opportunity to present the diverse research we are all working on with our peers. Often we find ourselves traveling to specific conferences to present to broader audiences engaged in our respective fields, which is wonderful but often creates a gap in the communication of research ideas within our own community. For those reasons, this even is such a great opportunity, not to mention a lot of fun! We will kick off the events tomorrow with the Colloquium speaker, Dr. William Uihlein, at 3:30 in room 1-304. Posters will be up in the lobby of building 4 from 1:00pm Wednesday through Friday, so please head over and take a look. Following the seminar tomorrow, we will meet for a poster session reception from 4:30-6:30. Please plan to attend the Colloquium address by Dr. Uihlein and then join us for a reception with your colleagues.

You can find a copy of the program here! There will be more than 50 students presenting on Tuesday, so please plan to attend to support the Warnell community to engage in the research happening right here at UGA!

Congrats to Derek Bahr

At the recent Southern Division AFS, our very own Derek Bahr was runner-up for the Best Student Presentation Award. Congrats Derek! The abstract of the talk he presented is below.

Atlantic Sturgeon recruitment in the Savannah River, Georgia

Derek L. Bahr

Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources–University of Georgia

180 E Green Street, Athens, GA 30602

Phone: (715) 869-0513

Email: dbahr286@uga.edu

Douglas L. Peterson

Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources–University of Georgia

180 E Green Street, Athens, GA 30602

Phone: (706) 542-2944

Email: dpeterson@warnell.uga.edu

Atlantic sturgeon were once abundant along the Atlantic Coast of North America from the Saint John River, Canada to the St. Johns River, Florida. Severe overfishing, coupled with habitat losses during the 1900s, resulted in major population declines that eventually led to the species’ listing under the US Endangered Species Act in 2012. Although Atlantic sturgeon are now considered endangered, quantified recruitment data are largely lacking for most systems, particularly among populations within the South Atlantic Distinct Population Segment (DPS). The objective of this study was to quantify annual recruitment of Atlantic sturgeon in the Savannah River, Georgia by estimating annual abundance of age-1 river-resident juveniles. During the summers of 2013–2014, we used anchored gill nets and trammel nets to sample juvenile Atlantic sturgeon throughout the Savannah River estuary. Ages of captured juveniles were determined using length-frequency histograms that were verified with fin ray cross sections from a subsample of the captured fish. Abundance of each juvenile age class was then estimated with Huggins closed-capture models in RMark. Our results showed that the Savannah River contained 528 (95% CI, 402–726) age-1 juveniles in 2013 and 616 (95% CI, 500–775) age-1 juveniles in 2014. These findings suggest that the Savannah River population is likely the 2^nd largest within the South Atlantic DPS.  Future estimates of juvenile abundance should help provide quantified information regarding population trends as well as identify key environmental variables affecting recruitment in the Savannah River system.

JAGS - WGSA Workshop Series

UPDATE: Here is the PowerPoint presentation from this workshop for your reference.

The next WGSA Workshop will be help on Wednesday (2/11) at 4:00 in the Dean's Conference Room. Paige Howell will lead us in an introduction to JAGS, a Bayesian software program. Please see a more detailed description below, and we hope you can join us!

Crash course in using JAGS through the R interface. Participants should have R (http://www.r-project.org/) installed on their computer as well as the rjags package and JAGS (http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net/) before coming. The workshop will briefly cover the basics of Bayesian inference using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. Participants will have a chance to work through an exercise building a model with the JAGS language and executing their script in R. Past experience with R, maximum likelihood parameter estimation, and generalized linear models is useful but not required.

Files for the course:
JAGS crash course
tadpole data
Poisson regression

WGSA Meeting Jan 22 6-8pm

We will be having our first spring 2015 meeting at Trans Met on Thursday January 22nd. We'll be providing pizza and beer, and discussing the upcoming symposium. This is a great opportunity to get involved and contribute to Warnell. The symposium is always a great time to present your research and see what your fellow students are working on. Please plan to attend! We'll be meeting upstairs around 6:00pm. See you then!

GIS Workshop

Basics of GIS will be the next in the WGSA Workshop Series, led by Jenny Asper and Emily Ayscue. This will be help October 21, at 3:30pm in the GIS Lab (building 4 - 4th floor). Description below:

If you have always heard “GIS” but never known how to tackle that beastly program ArcGIS, then Tuesday’s workshop will be great for you.  This will be an intro to GIS workshop that covers absolutely BASIC GIS.  We will talk about what exactly GIS is and some basic background that will help you understand what to do with files.  We will look at file types, where to get data, and how to get your data points into the program.  Lastly, we will look at what you should include in a map document and how to personalize your map.  This will be a brief overview, not meant to help you be a spatial pro, but just to make some basic maps for your own data.