What we do
UVic Ecostats is a graduate student-run group that aims to facilitate the learning of statistics as they apply to ecological systems. We meet on a weekly basis during the Fall and Spring semesters and everyone is welcome to attend. We believe that statistics should not be scary and that we can tackle our ecological stats problems with a group of like-minded peers.
Last year we focused a lot on building skills from the ground up and now with the new cohort of grad students starting, I think we have a lot of people at very different skill levels. To tackle this we are going to have some different series running through the semester. There are 5 different themes we will be working with throughout the year and we will make sure to be clear about which weeks are working in which series. They will be:
Feel free to attend all meetings every week or just participate in the series that are of interest to you and as always we love hearing your feedback and questions in the slack. There are also a few other lovely humans who have volunteered to help lead tutorials throughout the semester which we are super excited about, and if you are inspired to also take lead or co-lead on a tutorial, let me know and we can find a time for you.
We will also be trialling a coding “hour” this semester to see if it is helpful for people. This is totally optional but it might be a good way to make sure you get an hour or two of coding in each week. We will meet in the reading room and all just code. We can hold each other accountable and help each other with some light coding issues but big issues will be better discussed in a regular ecostats meeting. Come by and do some coding together and maybe even make a friend. We hope this will be very chill and beneficial to you.
- Beginner Series: These tutorials will be working on the basics of R and coding to help those of us who are just starting out. No prior knowledge required and the more questions people ask the more everyone will learn. We hope these tutorials will help people gain confidence working in R. If you have the basics down but still want to attend to refresh or to get some good tips and tricks from others or to share your helpful tips we hope everyone will feel comfortable attending.
- Plotting Series: This series will work on how to make different kinds of plots, mainly we will work with ggplot but we might branch into some other packages for more complex spatial data plots. We will tackle maps and creating our own themes, it will be very aesthetic and creative. This will be a good series for all skills because we will build up our skills together.
- Modelling Series: So much of what we do in eco related research involves models. These can be daunting so this series will help build your skills in modelling over the semester. To help me run these tutorials I have somehow convinced the lovely @Peter Thompson to lend a hand (many many thanks). We will work through all kinds of modelling and examples so we will become expert modellers in no time. These tutorials will start the first week in October so more info on this in October
- Advanced Series: These tutorials will tackle a variety of topics, some of which may be some repeats from last year (like the always requested how to use GitHub) and while these may not always require much coding experience, they will tackle topics that will be a bit more complex than the beginner series.
- Help Please Series: These tutorials will run every so often and be times where people can share their struggles or ideas and get feedback from the group. We will run these anytime there are a few people who would like to field questions so please let us know if you want one of these to be held. You can fill out this poll anytime to request a help meeting: https://forms.gle/jngDTyiRejmwd3sc6
Feel free to attend all meetings every week or just participate in the series that are of interest to you and as always we love hearing your feedback and questions in the slack. There are also a few other lovely humans who have volunteered to help lead tutorials throughout the semester which we are super excited about, and if you are inspired to also take lead or co-lead on a tutorial, let me know and we can find a time for you.
We will also be trialling a coding “hour” this semester to see if it is helpful for people. This is totally optional but it might be a good way to make sure you get an hour or two of coding in each week. We will meet in the reading room and all just code. We can hold each other accountable and help each other with some light coding issues but big issues will be better discussed in a regular ecostats meeting. Come by and do some coding together and maybe even make a friend. We hope this will be very chill and beneficial to you.
Contact us
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Questions? Email us at ecostats.uvic "at" gmail.com
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