Meetings

The 2024 Alaska Chapter of the American Statistical Association workshop (a hybrid event) will be held on Thursday-Friday, June 20-21, in Fairbanks, Alaska and online.

About this event

Bayesian capture-recapture inference with hidden Markov models

Date and time: Thursday - Friday, June 20 - June 21, 2024. 9 am – 5 pm each day.

Location: University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Akasofu Building, Room 401.

2160 North Koyukuk Drive, Fairbanks, AK 99709

Instructors: Sarah Cubaynes (in-person) and Olivier Gimenez (online)

Description: The hidden Markov modelling (HMM) framework has gained much attention in the ecological literature over the last decade, and has been suggested as a general modelling framework for the demography of plant and animal populations. In particular, HMMs are increasingly used to analyse capture-recapture data and estimate key population parameters (e.g., survival, dispersal, recruitment or abundance) with applications in all fields of ecology. In parallel, Bayesian statistics is relatively well established in ecology and related disciplines, because it resonates with scientific reasoning and allows accommodating uncertainty smoothly. The popularity of Bayesian statistics also comes from the availability of free pieces of software that allow practitioners to code their own analyses. In this workshop, we offer a Bayesian treatment of HMMs applied to capture-recapture data. Through a combination of lectures, real case studies and live demonstrations, you will get acquainted with multi-site, multi-state and multi-event capture-recapture models. We will use the R Nimble package that is seen by many as the future of ecological data modelling.

About the instructors

Sarah Cubaynes and Olivier Gimenez are both based in Montpellier, France. Dr. Cubaynes is an associate professor at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Dr. Gimenez is a Senior Scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research. More information about Dr. Cubaynes’ work can be found here and more information about Dr. Gimenez’s work can be found here.

Registration Rates

Meeting participants must register. The 2-day registration fee will cover the short course and also includes 2 catered lunches, coffee, and refreshments. In-person participants will be limited to 24 people. Online participants will not be capped.

General Registration: The general registration rate for the 2-day meeting is $350. The registration rate applies through June 13 (Thursday).

Late Registration: After June 13, a late registration rate of $400 will apply for the meeting.

Online Only Option: an online Zoom conference option for those that don't want or can't attend in-person for $150. Lunch is not provided.

Students: contact the organizer below to request a student fee waiver and travel funds that are available on a case-by-case basis, subject to need and available funds.

Meeting Contact

Lainey Gallenberg

715-222-9789

elaine.gallenberg@alaska.gov

The following are links pertinent to this year's meeting (links to files or to other web locations will become active when they become available):

Link Description
Information and 2-Day Registration Registration link for the eventbrite site.

All registrations should be made through this site. Payment for registration fees by credit card can only be made through the eventbrite site. Details for payment by check or on-site at the meeting are also provided.

Registering through this site will require a creation of a profile the first time you use the system (it files by your email address), so if you used this system in previous years your email is likely already registered.

Note that meeting attendees need to register via the on-line registration process, if you can not register on-line, contact Jiaqi Huang (907-267-2327) for assistance. Also direct all registration questions to Jiaqi.