Workshops

For the first time, the EDGG will organize technical workshops during its conference. All workshops are optional and places will be limited to 20. You can apply to participate in the workshops during registration: if the workshop is already full, you will be placed on a waiting list and informed if further places become available.

Please note that the scientific writing workshop has now been moved to Tuesday morning (09:00-13:00)! The policy workshop and the vegetation classification and database workshop will run in parallel on Tuesday afternoon 14.30-18.30, including a coffee break.

Scientific writing for peer-reviewed international journals

Tuesday morning 9.00-13.00

Workshop fee:  30 €
In order to register to this workshop please tick the respective checkbox during the conference registration procedure or edit your participation if you already registered.

The workshop is devoted to young scientists (PhD students, postdocs) who wish to publish in international peer-reviewed journals, but have limited experience in this. During the workshop we will, with presentations, discussions and practical exercises, elaborate how one can prepare a successful manuscript for such journals, from Introduction, via Methods, Results and Discussion sections to title, keywords and Abstract, including writing style, figure and table presentation and reference selection/list. At the end, the tutor will shortly address how to select the proper target journal and what you can expect from the peer-review process. Participants are encouraged to bring own examples of manuscripts (before submission or already in revision) to discuss critical points.

Tutor:

Jürgen Dengler got his PhD in ecology from the University of Kiel and after stations in Lüneburg and Hamburg is now Professor of Plant Ecology at the University of Bayreuth and Associate Member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). He has extensive experience as author of more than 200 scientific publications in the fields of vegetation ecology, biodiversity research, macroecology and conservation (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Juergen_Dengler) and regularly teaches scientific writing to students of different levels. The workshop will benefit from Jürgen’s activities as Chief Editor of Phytocoenologia, Associate Editor of Applied Vegetation Science and Guest Editor of many Special Issues in various international journals.

Reflecting ecology in policy

Tuesday afternoon 14.30-18.30

Workshop fee:  30 €
In order to register to this workshop please tick the respective checkbox during the conference registration procedure or edit your participation if you already registered.

This workshop will be facilitated by experts in agri-environmental policy. The objective is to jointly analyse several biodiversity-related measures in the Common Agricultural Policy to assess whether they correspond to available scientific knowledge, and debate how policies can be simple (i.e. applicable to real farming conditions) but ecologically meaningful. Results-based agri-environment schemes will be presented as one of the most recent developments in targeted conservation measures.

Selected participants will be asked to bring an example of an agri-environment (or other RDP) measure from the country/region in which they work for analysis and debate during the workshop. We therefore invite you to suggest a suitable measure during (or after) the online registration that you could present at the workshop.

Tutors:

Jabier Ruiz did a PhD on livestock grazing for wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean, and later worked (as a consultant for IUCN, ILC and WISP) in projects focused on pastoralism, land tenure and nature conservation. As coordinator of APMM, a grass-roots organisation from Andalucia (Spain), he started to work on European policy in collaboration with EFNCP in 2012. He is currently EFNCP Network and Communications Coordinator and a consultant for IUCN-Med.

Caitriona Maher did her PhD on the effects of farming practices and flood variables on the plant communities and insect assemblages of the Shannon Callows flood meadows in Ireland. Following this Caitriona began working with the successful Burren Life Programme in 2013, before beginning work with the EFNCP on their result-based pilot scheme in 2015.

Before joining IEEP in 2009 Clunie Keenleyside ran her own policy consultancy and held senior advisory posts in the government countryside agencies in England and Wales, where she led the development of agri-environment schemes focused on biodiversity conservation. She has more than 20 years’ practical experience of the design, implementation and monitoring of CAP policies for environmental land management across the EU, and has acted as an expert adviser on projects in Estonia, Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Romania, Croatia, Serbia and Turkey.

Establishing and maintaining national grassland databases and using their data for broad-scale vegetation classification and other research

Tuesday afternoon 14.30-18.30

Workshop fee:  free of charge
In order to register to this workshop please send an email to Liliana Gherghiceanu (liliana@fundatia-adept.org), stating your name, institution whether you have registered for the conference as well and a contact telephone number)

Workshop participants will learn (a) how one can technically organise large, high-quality databases in TURBOVEG that are compatible with international networks; (b) how the workflow of digitisation and geo-referencing can be done best; (c) how the legal framework (bylaws etc.) of such a collaborative project could be organised and how data contributors can be convinced to join, (d) what benefits can be expected from such a database and (e) specifically how one can develop a consistent broad-scale classification in a single new framework from cluster analyses, via determination of diagnostic species to the preparation of an expert system that allows the unanimous assignment of relevés. The focus is on the collaborative Romanian Grassland Database (RGD) and similar initiatives on the Balkans, in Ukraine, Turkey and the Caucasus, but participants from other regions are also welcome. We specifically hope that many current RGD Consortium members and other vegetation scientists with plot data from Romanian are joining so that at the end of the workshop we can start concrete planning of joint papers based on RGD data.

Tutors:

Kiril Vassilev got his PhD with a phytosociological study from the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where he is working as Associated Professor since 2010. He is doing extensive vegetation ecological field work in Bulgaria and neighbouring countries, mainly in grasslands, and is particularly interested in broad-scale vegetation classification. He founded the Balkan Dry Grassland Database and the Balkan Vegetation Database, and serves as Deputy Custodian for the Romanian Grassland Database (RGD), all of which are members of the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) and the global vegetation database sPlot.

Jürgen Dengler got his PhD in ecology from the University of Kiel for dissertation on vegetation classification methodology and is now Professor of Plant Ecology at the University of Bayreuth and Associate Member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). Jürgen founded the Nordic-Baltic Grassland Vegetation Database (NBGVD) and the Bavarian vegetation database (BayVegBase) as well as the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD; www.givd.info). He currently serves as member of the Coordinating Board of the European Vegetation Archive (EVA; http://euroveg.org/eva-database) and coordinates the global vegetation database sPlot.