Conference presentations & workshops

All the talks, posters, and workshops I’ve given over the years. I have tried to keep the associated materials openly available where possible. I really enjoy sharing my work and engaging with others, so if you would like to connect about it, please reach out!

Workshops

Workshops have become one of the most enjoyable parts of my engagements. Here is a list of all the workshops I have conducted. Please click on them to see more details or materials.

The best part of workshops is the interaction and questions from participants, which never fails to push me to think about something new!

• 

  Workshop · Eco Open Symposium by Research Quality Improvement (RQI) · Sošice, Nature Park Zumberak, Croatia · 20 Sept 2025 · 1 hour

  Instructor

  Reproducible Manuscripts with Quarto

  Transparency and reproducibility are fundamental aspects of good research practices. While replicating scientific findings can be challenging, computational reproducibility —particularly the outputs reported in a manuscript —must be entirely reproducible. In this workshop, we will learn to set up a reproducible workflow to create a publication-ready manuscript that combines data, analyses, text, figures and references into a single final output. We will use the Quarto publishing system in combination with R (or Python) to create a reproducible manuscript. More specifically, we will talk about:
  
  ● What Quarto? Why Quarto? — Pros and Cons of using Quarto Manuscripts
  ● Project Structure for transparency
  ● Using Markdown and Inline code for writing text
  ● Using Code Chunks and embedding outputs to create figures, tables
  ● Manage references using Zotero or BibTex
  ● Render our Quarto Project to Docx, HTML, pdf files
  
  This workflow is aimed at reducing the amount of human error, improving computational reproducibility and making updating scientific manuscripts more efficient. If you have used R-Markdown before, think of Quarto as its more powerful successor. It has the potential to be able to enhance transparency of a project and make it more accessible to other researchers.

• 

  Workshop · Behaviour 2025 Pre-conference Workshop · Kolkata, India · 24 Aug 2025 · 5 hours

  Instructor

  Introduction to Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

  Evidence synthesis, which includes systematic maps, research weaving, and meta-analysis, enables researchers to identify patterns across studies, assess generalisability, and understand context-dependent effects. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have become a standard approach for qualitatively and quantitatively synthesising evidence across fields, and their use has increased exponentially in the last decade. This workshop offers an applied introduction to the basics of evidence synthesis, focusing on systematic reviews and meta-analyses. We will explore what makes a strong systematic review and introduce some tools for literature search and screening. Next, we will focus on the meta-analytic process, including effect size selection, conducting multilevel meta-analyses and meta-regression in R, interpreting results and visualisation with some common plots. We will also explore heterogeneity and publication bias, which are essential for a comprehensive understanding of meta-analytical results. The session combines lectures, small hands-on exercises, and discussions, using real meta-analytic datasets. It will be ideal for PhD students, postdocs, and early-career researchers, but everyone is welcome. No prior experience with meta- analysis is required. Some basic statistical knowledge will be assumed for the workshop. Although this is not an R programming course, some familiarity with R is necessary. The workshop will use examples from behavioural ecology and evolution, but the methods are generally applicable across research fields.

• 

  Workshop · Physalia Courses · Online · 10 Feb 2025 · 5 days

  Co-instructor with Dr. Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

  Meta-analysis in R

  Evidence synthesis includes systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other forms of evidence such as systematic maps or research weaving that allow us to summarize knowledge. When preceded by a systematic review, meta-analysis is a powerful statistical tool for quantitatively integrating findings across studies to (1) test overall effects and their generalizability, (2) understand context-dependencies, and (3) generate and test second-order hypotheses. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have become a standard approach for qualitatively and quantitatively synthesizing evidence across fields, and their use has increased exponentially in the last decade. This course will provide a hands-on overview and introduction to modern methods for evidence synthesis, with a special focus on systematic review and meta-analysis in ecology and evolution.
  
  We will begin with a detailed overview of the systematic review approach, focusing on question formation, systematic searching and study screening. Next, we will focus on the meta-analytic process, specifically on effect size choice, data extraction, data analysis, and importantly, result interpretation. We will make use of multilevel meta-analysis and meta-regression, with an introduction on how to account for phylogeny when multiple species are synthesised. Since meta-analytic results cannot be interpreted without a deep understanding of heterogeneity and publication bias, we will cover in detail how to estimate, adjust for, and interpret heterogeneity and publication bias.
  
  This course will include a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises using real meta-analytic datasets. The emphasis throughout the course is on the application of the various methods and the interpretation of the results using the free software R and the R packages ‘metafor’ (Viechtbauer 2010) and ‘orchaRd’ (Nakagawa et al. 2023). The course will follow the principles of open science, with a strong focus on the importance of adhering to preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses in ecology and evolutionary biology (PRISMA EcoEvo; O’Dea et al. 2021). Throughout, we will consider examples of how to interpret results and present them using tables and data visualization, and for each step, we will provide literature and practical resources (e.g., R scripts).
  More details about the workshop can be found here: Meta-analysis in R .

Talks and Posters

Here are the talks and posters I’ve presented at conferences and scientific meetings. Please click on a card to see the slides or posters.

• 

  Talk · Behaviour 2025: XXXVIII International Ethological Congress · Kolkata, India · 30 Aug 2025

  Symposium: Quantitative Approaches in Behaviour

  Evaluating the Adaptive Function of Green Nest Material in Birds: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

  The addition of fresh green plant material to nests (e.g. leaves, sprigs and branches of trees and herbs) is a widespread behaviour across many bird species. An observed preference for certain aromatic plants and the active gathering of these plants beyond the territories in some birds, is suggestive of adaptive advantage. This behaviour has intrigued researchers for decades and several hypotheses have been proposed to explain it, including mate attraction, nest protection against parasites and pathogens, and direct benefits to nestlings. While many experimental studies have tested these different hypotheses, the evidence is conflicting, and yet, no quantitative synthesis has been conducted until now. In our study, we systematically reviewed the literature and meta-analytically synthesized all available experimental studies to assess the effect of green material on fitness proxies, including reproductive success, parasite load, and nestling health. We extracted 238 effect sizes from 29 studies coming from 6 bird species, including 2 unpublished datasets. Previous work has often assumed strong adaptive benefits, however our findings suggest otherwise. We find small and inconsistent yet positive effects (SMDH=0.16[CI:0.027-0.298], n=26, k=236) of fitness benefits of green nest material. Could the benefits be more context-dependent than previously thought? I will discuss the results of this meta-analysis and its implication for future research, shedding light on directions for the field.

• 

  Poster · Joint Graduate Meeting of the Ethological Society and the Behavioral Biology Section of the DZG · Bielefeld, Germany · 10 Nov 2023

  Estimating among individual variation in reaction norms: a meta-analytical approach

  Individual differences in animal behavior and physiology are important drivers of ecological and evolutionary processes. Variation in reaction norms, which describes how traits change in response to environmental variation for a given genotype, is a key aspect of these individual differences. While many studies use mixed-effects modeling to account for individual variation in reaction norms, few have quantified the magnitude of this variation. As such, the prevalance and magnitude of among-individual variation in reaction norms is not well-understood. We estimate the contribution of among-individual variation to total phenotypic variation and explore how accounting for this variation changes our inferences about population-level effects. We test the prediction that it explains only a small part of the total phenotypic variation in wild populations. We first systematically searched for studies using random-slope mixed-effects models to study phenotypic traits in non-human, non-inbred organisms, in the field or brought to controlled lab settings. Our analytical approach then builds on recent methodological advances that allow us to reanalyse published open datasets and integrate them using meta-analysis. The systematic literature search yielded 1765 unique references, out of which, 1196 passed the title-and-abstract screening, but only 170 provided open data and could then be reanalysed. Our results will provide a comprehensive and rigorous synthesis of the current state of knowledge on individual variation in reaction norms across species. These findings will be key to understand individuality, and thus, particularly important for the fields of animal personality and plasticity.

• Poster · NC3 Retreat 2023 · Dörentrup, Germany · 22 Aug 2023

  Do random slopes matter?

• Poster · NC3 Retreat 2022 · Hoherodskopf, Germany · 29 Aug 2022

  Estimating among individual variation in reaction norms