Invacost Workshop
From Biodiversity Dynamics:
In the framework of the newly created AXA Research Fund Chair of Invasion Biology, at the University of Paris Saclay, we are excited to announce the creation of a workshop on the economic costs of biological invasions.
This workshop will have an unusual setting. It will be held in the context of the finalization of InvaCost, the first global, comprehensive database on published economic costs of biological invasions. Invacost has taken years to design, develop and complete. It includes thousands of costs from hundreds of published materials and has been recorded keeping information on many variables, from country and species concerned, to type of costs and sector of activity. We are in the process of publishing the global, overall result of this compilation, but have enough data for plenty more papers. The primary objective of this workshop is to produce more papers out of this database, and we would like to give the community an opportunity to join us in doing so.
This three-day workshop will be devoted to working on different studies, most of which we hope to define beforehand; these will be of two categories. The first type will be original work focused on important, novel questions on the economic costs of invasions, such as how to best implement multi-dimensional extrapolation of costs from data that are very fragmented. Several such studies are programmed. The second type of papers will be more descriptive, and focused on providing complete analyses on one type of category of costs of invasions. It could be about the total cost of invasions in the USA, or any other region; about the cost of invasions in tourism, or any other activity sector; the costs of invasions in marine ecosystems, or any other ecosystem; the costs of invasive trees, invasive fish, or any other taxonomic group. It could be any other descriptive analyses of a given dimension of biological invasions, provided the data is available in Invacost. For an example of the type of papers this descriptive category could take, please see our publication on the economic costs of invasive insects, here. This secondary type of study should be fairly straightforward to implement and produce.
We would like to prioritize invitation of early career researchers for this workshop and the associated papers. Ideally, we will invite PhD Students, Postdocs or recent PIs that have started specializing on one aspect, and entrust them with the associated paper design, analyses and writing up, in collaboration with our group. Because we can’t host everybody, we will base our selection of candidates on both the question asked and the proposal to tackle it (probably also on perceived motivation and skills).
We are in the process of assessing the costs of the workshop and determining a participatory fee, as we will probably not be able to cover everything for everyone, but we will strive to cover the costs of Early Career Researchers who can’t afford to join us on their own grants.
The workshop will be held in November 2019, most probably during the week of the 11th-15th, near Paris. We will be isolated three full days, from Tuesday afternoon to Friday noon, devoting all time on analyses, discussion and writing. We will arrive on Tuesday morning and leave on Friday after lunch. Meals and accommodation will be provided in the same centre.
Click here to learn more.