SCCS-NY 2026 Workshops

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

-Understand most common concepts and funder expectations when applying to Small Conservation Grants.

-Avoid common mistakes when applying for a small conservation grant.

-Plan a safe budget for your application.-Write a clear story of your project when applying for a grant.

-Learn how to show your strengths and learn how to navigate rejection.

Organizers: Dr. Karla G. Hernandez-Aguilar and Dr. April Bagwill, Conservation Leadership Programme-BirdLife International

This crash course introduces participants to conservation marketing — the ethical application of marketing strategies and social science to shift attitudes and behaviors in support of conservation goals. Led by board members of the Society for Conservation Biology ‘s Conservation & Engagement Working group (ConsMark), this session explores how understanding human behaviors can be just as powerful as more traditional work when it comes to advancing conservation efforts.

Participants will leave with: A clear understanding of what conservation marketing is and why it matters, insight into how behavior change and social science principles are applied in real world examples, entry-level marketing skills they can bring into their own work, and an overview of ConsMark and how to get involved.Who we reach, how we communicate, and what motivates audiences to participate can dictate whether our conservation efforts succeed or fail. This workshop will demonstrate how the tools of social science and marketing can turn awareness into action. Regardless of your background, this session will help participants see conservation from a new angle.

Organizers: Lucy Chalgren and Micaiala Hamner, Society for Conservation Biology Conservation Marketing Working Group

Conservation success often depends on meaningful collaboration with local communities, yet many students and early-career conservationists receive limited training in community engagement and citizen science program design. This interactive workshop will introduce participants to practical approaches for developing community-based conservation initiatives using real-world examples from marine conservation projects in Colombia, including responsible whale and dolphin watching, whale shark conservation, sea turtle conservation, and marine mammal monitoring.

Through case studies, stakeholder-mapping exercises, and collaborative project design activities, participants will explore how local knowledge, environmental education, and scientific research can be integrated to support biodiversity conservation. Working in small groups, participants will design a conservation strategy for a hypothetical community facing environmental challenges and present their solutions for discussion and feedback.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: (1) understand the principles of community-based conservation and citizen science; (2) identify key stakeholders and develop engagement strategies; (3) design basic biodiversity monitoring programs involving local communities; (4) integrate education and outreach into conservation planning; and (5) apply practical tools for developing collaborative conservation projects in diverse social and ecological contexts.

Organizer: Ann Carole Vallejo, R&E Ocean Community Conservation

Large-area imaging (LAI)—stitching thousands of overlapping underwater photographs into centimeter-resolution orthoprojections—is transforming how we monitor reefs, letting us map entire reef plots non-destructively and revisit them over time. This hands-on workshop walks participants through the full LAI workflow using real coral reef imagery from Rapa Nui (Easter Island), from photographs to quantitative ecological insight.Working with sample orthoprojections and provided R code, participants will move through each stage: classifying benthic cover into ecologically meaningful classes, extracting individual coral colonies as spatial polygons, and quantifying spatial structure—colony dispersion, percent cover, and which organisms corals co-occur with at the scale of direct contact.

By the end, participants will be able to: (1) explain what LAI captures that traditional transects and quadrats miss; (2) describe the pipeline from imagery to classified, analysis-ready spatial data; (3) interpret coral spatial patterns and their conservation relevance for reef monitoring and resilience; and (4) identify accessible, low-cost tools to adapt LAI for their own systems.No prior coding or photogrammetry experience required.

Organizer: James Herlan, City University of New York

Facts and data are essential to conservation, but stories are often what move people to care. This interactive workshop explores how storytelling can deepen our connection to the natural world and inspire action on behalf of species, habitats, and ecosystems.

Drawing from examples in environmental writing, science communication, oral history, and community-based conservation, participants will examine how narratives shape public understanding of environmental issues. Together, we will explore why stories are uniquely powerful tools for fostering empathy, curiosity, wonder, and stewardship.Participants will engage in reflective writing and storytelling exercises designed to help them uncover and share their own meaningful connections to nature. Whether communicating about birds, forests, oceans, climate, or local landscapes, attendees will leave with practical techniques for crafting stories that resonate with diverse audiences and encourage conservation-minded thinking.

This workshop is intended for educators, writers, scientists, environmental professionals, students, and anyone interested in using the power of narrative to help people see, value, and protect the living world around them.

Organizer: Melody Serra, American Museum of Natural History

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, City University of New York; Anna Thonis, New York University; Daniel Lopez, American Museum of Natural History

Using Bayesian Framework to perform statistical analysis is a very helpful tool in conservation biology with the interpretation of its results being intuitive for habitat managers. Knowledge of Bayesian analysis will also help students gain an advantage while seeking careers of their choice in conservation biology. Through this workshop we plan on introducing students to Bayesian Theorem, priors, marginal distribution, MCMC chains, and Bayesian regression. We will teach participants how to check for convergence and steps they can take if the model is not converging. We will also teach how to interpret the results and address common mistakes often made while running Bayesian analysis. We will approach the workshop as if all the participants are new to Bayesian analysis. We will use R in this workshop and following packages: rjags and MCMCvis.

The workshop will be a combination of lecture and hands-on activity. We will provide students with sample data and R codes used in the workshop for future reference. 

Organizers: Anant Deshwal, Bradley University; Pooja Panwar, Dartmouth College

As more of the world has a camera at their fingertips, community science efforts are creating new resources for conservation scientists to understand changes and patterns in biodiversity. One of the most versatile community science resources is iNaturalist, a global biodiversity database with over 350 million multimedia observations and rising that’s utilized by everyone from non-scientists to government agencies. In this workshop, you will learn how to utilize iNaturalist for your own research as well as outreach in their local communities. We’ll cover the basics of how iNaturalist works, how to integrate iNaturalist observation data into research, how to take quality photos for identification, and how to plan a Bio Blitz or other biodiversity surveys with both scientists and non-scientists. Weather-permitting, we’ll also get outside and run our own short Bio Blitz! Throughout the workshop, we’ll also discuss how iNaturalist can be used as a tool to connect scientists with the communities they work with and different ways to integrate outreach into your research efforts.

This workshop is great for any level of expertise from casual nature enthusiasts to expert iNaturalist photographers.

Organizer: Malcolm Tunnell, California Department of Fish and Wildlife

Conservation tools are often designed in capitals and parachuted into landscapes. The communities who actually live with biodiversity, and whose decisions shape its future, are rarely at the design table. In Madagascar, we tried the opposite. OPT-Beta, a digital territorial planning and alert tool, was co-developed with seven community-managed protected areas in the Atsimo Andrefana region. Local managers, not engineers, defined what an alert should mean, when to send one, and who should act. The pilot reached 90% local appropriation, a rare figure for digital conservation tools in low-connectivity contexts. This workshop invites participants to step into that co-design process. Working in small groups, you will tackle real challenges from the next phase of the project. How do you build an environmental alert system that respects local knowledge? Which indicators reflect what communities, not only ministries, need? How do you keep a digital tool genuinely accountable to the people it serves?Participants will leave with concrete methods for human-centered conservation design, a critical lens on tech-for-good deployments, and adaptable approaches for their own community-based conservation work.

Organizers: Rindra Ramananjatovo, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Madagascar Country Office;Mahafaly Rambolamanana, University of Antananarivo, Madagascar

Visualization is a powerful means of enhancing our abilities to learn from data and to communicate results to others, especially when informed by insights into human behavior and social systems. Addressing complex and urgent environmental problems that involve diverse audiences involves understanding how to effectively communicate with data and is equally essential for researchers, policymakers, and the public alike. This course is for participants who wish to gain an understanding of the principles, tools, and techniques needed to communicate effectively with data. In particular, we will focus on how showing more of the data can increase understanding by the audience.

Organizer: Simon Queenborough, Yale School of the Environment

Earth is experiencing unprecedented changes through intensifying events such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and insect infestations, with related effects on ecosystem and human health. Impacts are putting pressure on our landscapes and ecosystems that generate food, fiber, energy and living spaces for a growing global population. Launched on July 30, 2025, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) consists of an Earth-orbiting satellite flying a highly capable imaging radar system optimized for studying Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, cryosphere, and surface deformation (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/). NISAR is entering its operational mode wherein all of Earth’s land surface and sea ice will be imaged every 12 days, providing a heretofore unprecedented capability for studying ecosystems world-wide. NASA’s NISAR Science Team has developed a suite of tools in Jupyter Notebook frameworks that provide capabilities to apply NISAR imaging radar data to address issues of ecological and environmental concern.

This workshop will introduce participants to the capabilities of NISAR for application to ecosystems conservation. Participants will learn about the NISAR capabilities and mission plan. Working individually or in groups of two, participants will learn how to access and analyze NISAR data using the Jupyter notebook framework. Participants will develop familiarity with NISAR toolkits to address conservation science concerns.

Organizers: Katherine Silverman, Kyle McDonald, Terry Elkes, The City College of New York; Erika Podest, Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Seriously Funny: Using Humor and Storytelling for Science Communication is an interactive workshop that teaches scientists practical communication techniques drawn from stand-up comedy, storytelling, and improvisation. Led by former research scientist and touring comedian Sarah Adelman, participants learn how to make complex ideas clearer, more engaging, and more memorable without sacrificing scientific accuracy.Through guided exercises, collaborative joke-writing, and real-world communication challenges, participants apply these techniques directly to their own research, presentations, and outreach. The workshop provides a supportive environment to experiment with humor, strengthen storytelling skills, and receive constructive feedback from both peers and Sarah.

Participants leave with practical communication tools they can immediately apply to talks, teaching, grant pitches, media interviews, and science outreach!

Organizer: Sarah Adelman 

Genomics has become a crucial tool for wildlife conservation management, providing insight into a population’s capacity to evolve and adapt in response to environmental change. It can be difficult to conduct research in this field due to various limitations, such as time, budget, permits, transportation, and access to equipment and technology. The introduction of portable sequencing devices has allowed for researchers to overcome these types of hurdles, furthering their conservation genomics research in the field at an accelerated rate. This workshop will explore the intersection of genomics and conservation and how this technology can revolutionize both fields. Participants will 1) learn the fundamentals of how to utilize genomic data to further wildlife conservation, 2) understand and gain hands-on experience with the Oxford Nanopore MinION workflow in a laboratory setting, 3) discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and applications of this technology, and 4) analyze real Nanopore data produced in the field. From this workshop, participants will take away new technical skills and ideas to apply to their future research in conservation science.

NOTE: Basic molecular lab experience and closed-toe shoes are required to participate in the hands-on portion of this workshop.

Organizers: Megan Wallace, American Museum of Natural History; Lindsey Hauff, Rutgers University

This session will be an opportunity for participants to reflect on their own academic and work history while exploring future directions and developing skills to help navigate the uncertainties and diversity of the job market today, including the role of AI, funding, and how to tailor application materials to different roles in various sectors. Bring your most recent CV or resume with you to edit and peer-review each other’s materials for different job types. We will also practice networking, job interview and negotiation skills, 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, University of Massachusetts, Boston; Alex Moore, Montclair State University; Erin Betley and Mary Blair, American Museum of Natural History