Work on your questions

A key feature of the workshop is that you will be able to develop models for your biological questions and data. Do not expect to leave the CEFE with a management action plan or a paper ready to be sent out for publication; rather, think of developing the first steps that will allow you to go on developing the models you need in your career. You should think about the following points in order to mentally prepare for topics that will be extensively covered in the workshop:

- Prioritize a subset of your questions/objectives, we won’t be able to address all of them

- Population structure (age, size, stages, any combination…)

- Population life cycles: individual development and progression over the life course

- Estimates or guesstimates of key vital parameters:  that’s where we will start from, with no time to analyze data during the workshop e.g. to attain survival and fecundity estimates (but see the Capture-Recapture workshop offered at the CEFE during 17-21 March 2014).

The main features you think are necessary to address your questions in a model: environmental variation, small population size, resource constraints and density-dependence, etc.