Short Courses and Workshops

2020 – 55th Annual Wildlife Management Short Course

The Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, will again offer the annual Wildlife Management Short Course on the campus during the week of March 30 – April 3rd, 2020. This popular course was developed for laypersons and agency personnel with non-wildlife training. A number of agencies have sent administrators, commissioners, planners, information, environmental education personnel, legislators, and other staff to this course to obtain a broad exposure to wildlife conservation and management. Citizen conservation organizations have also sent staff members.

This five day short course is designed to provide an overview of principles of wildlife (including fisheries) ecology and management. Current programs and issues related to natural resources conservation will also be discussed. The short course consists of presentations by University faculty and personnel from various agencies and organizations. Field trips may involve fishery research techniques demonstrations and a visit to a raptor rehabilitation center. There will also be a banquet held on the last night, Thursday night, to recognize the participants.

To Register for the workshop please contact Office of Conference Services – Wildlife Management Short Course at 970-491-6222 or visit this link.

Program MARK Workshops

This intermediate-level workshop will provide quantitative biologists and statisticians with the statistical background to understand the main-stream analyses performed by Program MARK, and the familiarity with the program to perform these analyses.  A mixture of lectures and laboratory exercises will be provided. Participants will learn the basics of parameter estimation with likelihood theory, model selection with Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC), and the binomial and multinomial distributions. The Cormack-Jolly-Seber (CJS) mark-recapture, band (tag or ring) recovery, known fate, and closed captures models will be covered in detail. More advanced models will be described so that participants will understand the benefits of these models, but those models would not be covered extensively. Use of covariates, including individual covariates, will be covered with the CJS and band recovery models.
The clientele for this workshop are biologists with experience in the analysis of data from marked animals. The content is aimed at providing the participants with a solid background in the philosophy, theory, and analysis of data from marked animals. This is not a workshop for beginners to this subject.
Format of the workshop will be a combination of lectures and computer lab exercises. The workshops typically start on Monday mornings, at 8:00 am, and end Fridays at noon (with some time during Friday afternoon to address specific user questions). Evening sessions would be provided as needed to cover the workshop material. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own data for analysis to the workshop, but should recognize that a thorough analysis will not be completed at the workshop. Given the amount of material to be covered, attendees likely would not be able to begin analysis of their own data until Thursday afternoon.
Workshop Instructors: Gary C. White, Paul F. Doherty, Jr., Evan G. Cooch
For further details, or specific questions, please contact Gary White (Gary.White@colostate.edu).