Graduate/Professional Training at Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation The Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation, a partnership between George Mason University and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI), is proud to announce their upcoming 2018 courses. We're excited to be offering a number of new courses. All courses are between 5 to 12-day intensive residential courses hosted in our sustainably-built Academic Center on the grounds of SCBI in Front Royal, Virginia, USA. All courses offer continuing education credits (CEUs) and some can be taken for graduate credit. Limited scholarships are available for eligible applicants. See our upcoming offerings below and check out our website (http://SMConservation.gmu.edu) for more course details and pricing.
Course: Communication and Facilitation Skills for Conservation Managers (new!) Date: April 16-20, 2018 (apply by Feb 5 for priority consideration) Details: The IUCN SSC Conservation Planning Specialist Group, in partnership with other leading international conservation organizations, will be delivering a professional training course designed to enable conservation managers, scientists and students to manage group decision-making processes more effectively. In today's world many of the conservation problems we solve, decisions we take and plans we develop involve collaboration with other people and organizations. Such collaboration is difficult to achieve and requires a certain set of interpersonal and process skills to be most effective. This course is designed to achieve this, building your competencies around listening, conflict resolution, team development, problem-solving and collective group decision-making. By the end of the course you should feel better equipped to manage internal meetings, difficult inter-personal discussions and design multi-stakeholder planning workshops. Course: Camera Trapping Study Design and Data Analysis for Occupancy and Density Estimation Date: June 4-15, 2018 Details: This course provides a theoretical and analytical background in the use of camera traps to address ecological and conservation-oriented questions including the estimation of animal abundance, density and occupancy, and the monitoring of population trends over time. In addition to 3-4 day modules on both occupancy modeling and density estimation using spatially-explicit approaches (SCR), the course includes a module on data management, introductory work in the program R, and time for focused work with instructors on participants' own datasets. SCR analysis will be done in R using the package "oSCR". Occupancy modeling will be taught in the program Presence, with additional work in R. Additional Upcoming Courses: -Practical Zoo Nutrition Management (May 7-11, 2018) -Non-Invasive Techniques and Applications in Wildlife Endocrinology (new!) (July 23 - August 3, 2018) -Ecology and Conservation of Migratory Birds (September 17-28, 2018) -Bioinformatics Analysis for Conservation Genomics (new!) (October 10-19, 2018)
