SCCS-NY 2024 Workshops

This workshop emphasizes the power of creative storytelling to effectively communicate complex science and conservation issues. Participants will explore ‘who’ the target audiences are, ‘why’ communication is crucial, and ‘how’ best to engage different stakeholders through creative communication approaches.Key topics:

• Evaluating Communication Needs: Identifying key audiences, understanding stakeholder engagement, and adapting to the nuanced social, political, and cultural contexts with which conservation practitioners work.
• Creative Visualisation Techniques: Methods for visualizing data and crafting compelling narratives that highlight the importance of blending traditional storytelling with creative and unconventional approaches.

• Strategic Media Utilization: Utilizing various forms, including educational games, infographics, creative data visualizations, interactive digital experiences, and public installations, among others, to effectively convey complex messages and engage diverse audiences.
• Collaboration: Exploring the importance of cross-disciplinary collaborations for exchanging skills, ideas, reach, and impact, to enhance communication efforts.
• Adaptive Strategies: Emphasizing continuous learning, adaptation, and setting effective feedback loops to refine communication strategies.

Designed as an introductory session, this workshop encourages participants to engage in critical discussions about applying these techniques in real-world scenarios. The goal is to ignite curiosity and inspire continued exploration, enabling participants to tailor and expand these communication strategies to meet diverse conservation challenges.

Organizer: Aditi Rajan, Head of Communications and Outreach, Wildlife Conservation Society - India

This session will be an opportunity for participants to reflect on their own academic and work history while exploring future directions, developing skills in career planning, networking, and self-promotion, and gaining a toolset for creating and holding space for themselves in the workplace. Interested in industry? Aching for academia? Never gonna give up non-profits? Pretty sure you're perfect for policy? Wooed by science writing? Then bring your curious self to our workshop where we'll do hands-on self-assessment activities, discuss varied options in conservation career pathways, and share in small-groups about the challenges and rewards of the work we aspire to do. And don't forget: the more, the merrier! We invite senior scientists and practitioners to speak about their experiences, post-docs and graduate students to group-share their goals, and undergraduates & high schoolers to discuss their developing ideas. Join us!

Organizers: Christian Rivera, Princeton University; Erin Betley, Nadav Gazit, Mary Blair, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History

Humans have been shaping the environment for centuries but recent decades have seen an acceleration of habitat loss and destruction due to pollution, changing land-use, and climate. Being a species that prioritizes visual stimuli, we are driven by visual observations of natural phenomena, especially colors in nature. Animal coloration has captivated scientists for centuries, serving not only aesthetic purposes, but also providing insights into animal survival, communication, and ecological interactions. Human-induced environmental stressors can disrupt animal coloration, impacting their production, perception, and functions. Conservation efforts are now incorporating cues from visual ecology to monitor populations at risk and devise innovative conservation strategies. This workshop aims to explore the diverse applications of animal coloration in conservation studies and equip participants with practical skills and knowledge to apply these concepts in their research and conservation practices.Learning goals:1. Understand the evolutionary and ecological functions of animal coloration in predator-prey dynamics, communication, and habitat adaptation.2. Learn how animal coloration can be measured and used as a tool for conservation, including monitoring biodiversity, assessing habitat quality, and mitigating human-wildlife conflicts.3. Discuss case studies of animal coloration research in conservation.4. Develop strategies for incorporating animal coloration research into conservation outreach initiatives.

Organizer: Anuradha Batabval, FLAME University, Maharashtra, India

Recording ecosystems in stereo formats e.g A-B, ORFT and MS provide a good listening experience, but recording in Binaural formats gives the listener a 3rd dimension advantage, i.e, the feeling of being in the space and precisely localizing sound sources. Because of these additional qualities, it is proposed to explore its full application in conservation bioacoustics. This workshop comes in two phases, i.e, theory session with realtime practical examples and references and a full practical session where participants will construct two types of binaural microphones, record and design a sound installation with them.Application of Binaural Technologies in Conservation Bioacoustics: Goals

• Provide workshop participants with practical skills which helps them build sound installations which cover immersive, larger and complex data on fragile ecosystems.
• Equip participants with a "musical" approach to listening to ecosystems accompanied with spectral, scientific data and photography which easily conveys the message of conservation. Examples are "Fragments of Extinction" by David Monacchi and "The Great Animal Ochestra" by Bernie Krause.
• Equip partcipants with a new media, engaging, and an easy-to-grasp approach to conservation education for diverse age groups.

Organizer: Samuel Kudjodzi, Bauhaus University of Weimar, Germany, and SEAM Weimar

Introduced species bring up a variety of strong opinions and emotions for conservation educators, restoration practitioners, and others. During this workshop, we consider how words like “invasive” and “alien” convey cultural concepts that can be off-putting depending on one’s lived experiences. We will also provide a starting point to explore how to build more inclusive, just, and scientifically sound communication practices. This session will pair a presentation, including a historical analysis of invasion biology, with engaging exercises and interactive activities that will interrogate accepted language and perspectives to create new frameworks for invasive species communications. We aim to provide a safe learning space for participants to be vulnerable and honest about their own experiences.After this workshop, participants will:

• Understand the history of invasion biology and its impact on perspectives and language.
• Be able to explain why the language we traditionally use in communicating about invasive species is not ecologically accurate and can cause harm.
• Reflect on their current perspectives and practices and workshop ways of describing ecological realities that are inclusive of those who have been traditionally marginalized in conservation spaces.

Organizers: Neha Savant, NYC Parks' Natural Resources Group; Elisa Caref, Billion Oyster Project); Georgina Cullman, NYC Parks' Natural Resources Group

Species distribution modeling (SDM) is an important tool for conservation as it enables scientists to estimate present species range limits and make range predictions in other geographic areas and time periods. Although advances in model building and evaluation are widespread in the ecology and evolution literature, most cutting-edge modeling methods are inaccessible to those who cannot read and write computer code, resulting in a ‘barrier to use’ for many potential users. The Wallace ecological modeling application, implemented in the R programming language as the CRAN package “wallace,” provides a graphical user interface that allows any user to implement advanced SDM methods. Each Wallace module provides extensive guidance text and references key papers from the literature to help both new and experienced users learn best practices. Each model-building session can be exported as a fully documented R Markdown script file, thereby enabling reproducibility, ease of reporting, and - for more advanced users - access to an easily-modifiable code script that extends Wallace’s functionality. In this workshop, we will go through the basics of SDM using Wallace. We will demonstrate (1) the key features of the modular software, (2) applications to conservation science, and (3) the utility of SDM outputs for IUCN assessments.

Organizers: Andrew Gaier, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Daniel Lopez, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History; Bethany Johnson, City College of New York

In the last century, thousands of visitors have observed the habitat dioramas within the American Museum of Natural History with intrigue and awe. These illuminated spectacles were so lifelike, depicting actual places in space and time—telling their stories—that viewers were able to experience not only the habitats, but also animal behavior. Their vivid stories influenced public opinion about the value of these places and their need for conservation. To this day, what many viewers do not realize is that the magic of the habitat dioramas, their powerful impact, is enabled through the capacity to visualize them—here the careful construction of spatial illusion produced by a curved background painting, elements collected from specific sites, and taxidermized specimens from biomes around the world. More recently, habitat dioramas have been the subject of critiques that challenge the diorama’s staged visions and the separation, behind panes of glass, of ourselves from nature. Moreover, the species and habitats depicted are out of sync with the effects of climate change. However, these remarkable dioramas have enduring qualities that can further serve to educate and empower the public. All we need are new stories, and the capacity to visualize them.This workshop will focus on collaborative and co-creative exercises to develop these science-supported “stories”—scenarios based on current conservation science and speculation—for three to five selected habitat dioramas. These future “scenarios” will imagine not only the changes to these diorama habitats—their environmental stressors, along with adaptations under climate change and biodiversity loss, but will speculate on their futures through design interventions and conservation efforts, many of which are being realized in our world.In this way the project serves to not only shape public discourse but facilitates how visitors might feel leaving the museum, with not just empathy—but agency and even empowerment.

**PLEASE NOTE: This workshop will run through BOTH workshop sessions (1:00–5:30 PM)**

Organizers: Julia Czerniak, University of Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning; Nina Marie Lister, Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Urban and Regional Planning

This session will be an opportunity for participants to reflect on their own academic and work history while exploring future directions, developing skills in career planning, networking, and self-promotion, and gaining a toolset for creating and holding space for themselves in the workplace. Interested in industry? Aching for academia? Never gonna give up non-profits? Pretty sure you're perfect for policy? Wooed by science writing? Then bring your curious self to our workshop where we'll do hands-on self-assessment activities, discuss varied options in conservation career pathways, and share in small-groups about the challenges and rewards of the work we aspire to do. And don't forget: the more, the merrier! We invite senior scientists and practitioners to speak about their experiences, post-docs and graduate students to group-share their goals, and undergraduates & high schoolers to discuss their developing ideas. Join us!

Organizers: Christian Rivera, Princeton University; Erin Betley, Nadav Gazit, Mary Blair, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History