Tours and Workshops

This 2.5-day field trip travels from Salt Lake Valley, location of the 2025 CANVAS meeting, to Cache Valley, home of Utah State University’s main campus in Logan. 

Topics and stops include Great Salt Lake, the largest saline lake in the western hemisphere (oolitic sand beach, playas, ecological and economic importance of the lake, lake level fluctuations, efforts to save the lake, and environmental implications of the shrinking and drying lake); saline and sodic soil genesis, morphology, classification, use, and management; forest vegetation influence on montane soil development; and the landscape history of Pleistocene pluvial Lake Bonneville, the Middle Rocky Mountains, and the Basin and Range/Great Basin. 

Simon Riley and Edzard van Santen will jointly host this hands-on training in the analysis of repeated measures data. The content and delivery will be tailored to an audience of 10 to 30 graduate students and/or early career researchers in the crop, soil, and environmental sciences. The workshop will open with a concise review of the conceptual/theoretical underpinnings of mixed model analysis of repeated measures data, including a discussion of the implications of violating the linear model assumption of independent observations, the limitations of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and the basic principles of “G-side” and “R-side” modeling. 

Participants will then be guided through three hands-on example analyses of data from actual agronomic experiments entailing repeated measures in time, repeated measures in space, and doubly-repeated measures in both time and space. In order to make the content as broadly accessible as possible, these three example analyses will be demonstrated in parallel using both SAS and R. Participants will leave not only with an improved conceptual understanding of mixed model analysis of repeated measures data, but both practical experience working through such analyses and template scripts which they can adapt to their own future research. 

Participants will be expected to bring a laptop. For those intending to follow the R analyses, they will need to have the following installed on their computer: RStudio (version 2024.12.0 or higher), the R software (version 4.4.0 or higher), and recent versions of all required R packages (TBD). Those intending to follow the SAS analyses will need to either have SAS (version 9.4) installed on their laptop or have a SAS OnDemand for Academics account. Participants will be provided detailed instructions on installation and setup of all required software/accounts at least one week prior to the workshop.

The workshop goal is for participants to understand the distinguishing features of high-quality Systematic Review (SR) and to be able to apply their understanding to selecting and conducting the SRs that are appropriate to their own research questions. The workshop will cover the critical steps of a SR protocol from question development and search strategies to data extraction, meta-analytical synthesis and visualization. The course is collaboratively taught by a team of experts in agricultural sciences, information studies and statistics. The focus will be on research questions concerning management and technology efficacy in agricultural systems and agricultural impacts on ecosystem services. 

All course materials are open access and participants will be introduced to an array of tools and resources to facilitate synthesizing large volumes of primary literature. Workshop participants will be introduced to the theoretical underpinnings of meta-analysis. Hands-on exercises include developing / implementing a repeatable and comprehensive search strategy for relevant literature using Web of Science, extracting targeted data from the primary literature, and conducting and interpreting meta-analyses using various R packages.

The Geospatial Nutrient Tool Pro generates manure application setback maps for the CNMP documents and calculates the spreadable and non-spreadable acres for each field and send it over to the Manure Management Planner. The Web-MMP is a new online application to develop CNMPs. Currently it is available for Ohio only, but other states are in the pipeline to be added.

Recent advances in drone technology have revolutionized the remote sensing community by providing means to collect fine spatial and high temporal resolutions at affordable costs. As people are gaining access to increasingly larger volumes of drone and satellite geospatial data products, there is a growing need to extract relevant information from the vast amount of freely available geospatial data. However, the lack of specialized software packages tailored for processing such data makes it challenging to develop transdisciplinary research collaboration around them. 

This workshop aims to bridge the gap between big geospatial data and research scientists by providing training on an open-source online platform for managing big drone data known as Data to Science. Additionally, attendees will be introduced to powerful Python packages, namely Geemap and Leafmap, designed for the seamless integration and analysis of drone and satellite images in various applications. 

By participating in this workshop, attendees will acquire the skills necessary to efficiently search, visualize, and analyze geospatial data within a Jupyter environment, even with minimal coding experience. The workshop provides a hands-on learning experience through practical examples and interactive exercises, enabling participants to enhance their proficiency and gain valuable insights into leveraging geospatial data for various research purposes.

Many scientists feel a duty to communicate with the public, but at the same time, they often feel intimidated by speaking with the media, lack confidence, or are concerned about facing hostile interviewers or publics. Namely, scientists often express their discomfort with interviews and their concerns about potentially being misquoted and misunderstood, which can act as a roadblock to engaging with the media. This is particularly true in the current political climate.

Through presentations, discussions, hands-on activities, and mock interviews, this workshop will guide participants through the most important things to know about the media ecosystem and how to interact with it effectively as a source, making language choices that will make your science more accessible to lay audiences, developing messages and working them into responses to interview questions, how reporters find expert sources, and how to navigate and survive uncomfortable interview questions and situations. 

The workshop is presented by facilitators from SciLine, a program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that connects scientists and journalists to bring scientific evidence to general audiences through news stories, and will pull from the lessons we’ve learned from facilitating more than 5,000 interactions between those two groups.

Wet aggregate stability is a key indicator of soil structure. Image-based analysis is a means of increasing the accessibility of aggregate stability measurements to facilitate soil health assessment and inform land management at scale. Building on the work of Fajardo et al. (2016), the Soil Health Institute (SHI) has developed a new version of the Slakes mobile app for reliable quantification of soil structure in the field, kitchen, or classroom. 

This session will provide an overview of the slakes measurement workflow and outputs. A high-throughput procedure for simultaneous analysis of multiple samples—and results from regional soil health surveys applying the method—will also be discussed. There will be a hands-on with slakes demo with provided soil samples. Also, folks are welcome to bring your own soil (BYOS) to measure aggregate stability at the workshop. 

The main purpose of the workshop is to provide hands-on training for students, researchers, and retailers on measuring soil aggregate stability via the free Slakes smartphone app.

A well-written material and methods section should be detailed enough so that a competent researcher can replicate the experiment including the statistical analysis. The objective of the workshop is to equip participants, in a hands-on setting, with the knowledge and skills necessary to write an informative and professional Materials and Methods section for any scientific paper. You will also be expected to complete a pre-workshop assignment.

Peer review is an essential part of the scientific publishing process, but many early career professionals are not comfortable taking on this important task without experience. In this workshop you will receive hands-on instruction on the peer review process from a team of experienced mentors. 

You will be placed in a group of people with similar scientific backgrounds as you gain the skills necessary to become a confident reviewer. All attendees will be expected to complete a pre-workshop assignment before attending the workshop.

Simplifying your writing doesn't mean dumbing it down. It means clear, concise, and easier-to-read writing in spite of complex ideas. You will learn to make your writing more accessible to your readers. The objectives include: writing more concisely, reducing too-long sentences, substituting simpler words, managing jargon, etc. Attendees should bring a laptop and a recent writing example. We will demonstrate a little-known function in Microsoft Word to assess readability.