Recognizing the need for in-service training for natural resource managers, who often do not have travel funds to attend in-person training, the USGS Status and Trends of Biological Resources Program is developing a series of free online courses, which are presented by conference call. The courses are open to all that are interested. Although there is no charge for the courses, you will need to call long-distance to our phone bridge to paricipate. For more information, please join our e-mailing list below. Courses include:
• Designing Natural Resource Monitoring Surveys
• Occupancy Estimation and Modeling (Proportion of Area Occupied [PAO] estimation)
• Structured Decision Making (Adaptive Management)
• R Statistical Package (open source = free)
• Identification of Native Bees
Please suggest other courses that would be helpful for natural resource managers.
One participant commented “I was pessimistic about the conference-call and PowerPoint format, but I found that it worked very well. I would gladly use this format again. I value personal interactions that come from real meetings, but given travel restrictions, costs, limited time for training (away from our daily tasks) I think this worked very well.” Another said “This was great! That's for making this opportunity available, and in these times of reduced funding, the conference call method was the only way I would have been able to attend the class.”
At the request of the National Park Service, Inventory and Monitoring Program, we developed a short course on Designing Natural Resource Monitoring Surveys ( http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/brd/SamplingCourse.htm ). The course provides an introduction, which will allow participants to understand survey design concepts, as well as the issues and trade-offs which need to be resolved. We have taught that short course twice without charge to participants and will present in again April 23 – May 3, 2007. Last year we had 192 participants, including representative of the following agencies FWS 84, NPS 80, FS 14, BLM 6, USGS 5, Parks Canada 2, and BR 1. There were ten two-hour lectures by ten presenters over a week. Power Point slides, supporting documents and a simulation program (see image) were available for download. A course evaluation ( found that 82 percent of the respondents preferred the conference call/web format and only 17 percent favored an in-person course, if they had to pay travel costs. All of the respondents found the course to be useful and 36% said it was very useful. One participant said “Now I have a better understanding for designing a natural resource monitoring program. I really appreciate the time each instructor took to prepare and present the topic.” Another commented “the discussions were extremely helpful and probably the greatest advantage of the setup of the course. I particularly appreciated the email discussion and access to further postings of citations and resources.”
We are offering another free short course for natural resource managers on learning the R Statistical Package ( http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/brd/learnR.cfm ), an open source (free) statistical package. We have an hour session each Thursday (repeated the following Tuesday) using conference calls and WebEx for live demonstrations. We started on November 2, 2006 and the course is continuing, covering the statistical package in depth and working analyses suggested by participants. With the increasing cost of commercial statistical packages, a free package is very attractive. However, free does not imply second rate. R is a high quality package that is better than commercial package in many respects. Although SAS is the most common statistical package in general use, R (or S) is the most popular with statistical researchers, and new statistical methods often are available first in R. R can easily import and export data to and from Microsoft Access and Excel as well as text files. However the documentation on R, like many open source products, is not as good as that for commercial packages, increasing the need for training. Two hundred thirty four people have registered for the Learning R course (FWS 55, NPS 53, USGS 52, FS 35, State Agencies 14, others 25).
Sam Droege presented a free tutorial using WebEx and conference calls on learning to use Discoverlife online guides to North American bee identification (http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/brd/bee.cfm) and will be repeating this course. There is a great need for individuals who can accurately identify bees, an important pollinator group, for inventory and monitoring programs. A group of us have spent the past 3 years developing web-based identification guides to the bees of North America north of Mexico . We have working guides for all the species east of the Mississippi River (with the exception of Shecodes ) with a few guides now covering the entire continent. The guides provide for greater flexibility, speed, and accuracy than traditional dichotomous keys and can be updated easily when names and identification issues change.
This spring or summer, Darryl MacKenzie will offer a course on Occupancy Estimation and Modeling, with five two-hour conference call and WebEx sessions. There is a long history of counting animals to draw inferences about their numbers. However, recently there has been much concern that the counts may reflect as much about noise and other conditions as it does about the animal population. Estimating the proportion of area occupied (PAO) provides a flexible and robust approach to monitoring populations that is not affected by changes is detectability.
Jim Nichols will present a course on Structured Decision Making (adaptive management). Structured decision making is an approach to conservation and management that has been specifically identified by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an approach meriting increased collaboration between scientists and managers of the two agencies. The U.S. Department of Interior guidance on adaptive management similarly recognizes this specific approach to structured decision making as an approach to be emphasized. In addition to this institutional support, structured decision making, both in general and specifically as a means of integrating monitoring and conservation, has strong scientific support.
To receive notices of our short courses, please sign up for our e-mailing list at above. For more information, please contact, Paul Geissler, USGS Status and Trends of Biological Resources Program, Paul_Geissler@usgs.gov , 301-497-5780
USGS is offering free short courses to natural resource managers by conference call with PowerPoints and supporting documents posted on the web. The courses are open to all those who are interested. Although there is no charge for the course, you will need to call long-distance to our phone bridge to paricipate. Some sessions have interactive web demonstrations. Please join our e-mailing list to receive more information about these short courses.
U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey
URL:
http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/mailingListJoin.cfm
Page Contact Information: Paul_Geissler@usgs.gov
