Workshop Updates

On behalf of the IEP Workshop Planning Committee, I want to thank everyone who attended the 2023 Annual IEP Workshop. It was so nice to see so many smiling faces. This was IEP's first hybrid workshop and it went very well. The acoustics in the new auditorium were exceptional and the seats were very comfy. The poster room was large and it was nice to have an overflow room where you could watch the sessions and multi-task at the same time. Had the weather been better the first two days, it would have been nice to sit outside at the numerous tables located around the auditorium.

We had a great showing of work by our early career professionals. The judges thoroughly enjoyed listening to all the presentations and reading the posters. The evaluation sheets were tallied and the winners were announced at the end of the workshop. For those who missed the announcement, we want to acknowledge the Early Career Award winners for Best Presentation and Best Poster.

Best Presentation:

• First Place: Madison Thomas (DWR) for "Controlling Invasive Phragmities australis at a Restoration Site in Suisun Marsh"
• Second Place (tie): Emily Richardson (USGS) for "A Multiparameter Approach to Modeling Light Attenuation in the Delta"
• Second Place (tie): Leticia Cavole (UC Davis) for "Fitness Tradeoffs for Migratory and Resident Delta Smelt in the San Francisco Estuary"

Best Poster:

• First Place: Alisa Dahl (CDFW) for "Confirmed Presence of Green Sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris) in the Stanisalus River"
• Second Place: Diana Muñoz (UC Davis/USGS) for "Long-term Dataset Reveals Black-crowned Night-heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) Nest Survival is Primarily Associated with Bottom-up Processes on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, California"
• Third Place: Andrea Jaegge (USGS) for "Identifying Microcystin Sources and Producers in San Francisco Bay"

IEP Program Support staff are in the process of downloading the presentation recordings. Once we finish reviewing the closed captioning, the recordings for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will be placed on the IEP playlist on the CDFW You Tube channel. We'll let the IEP community know where to find them once the recordings are up. Not all of the presentations were recorded (per directive from the presenters), so if a talk is missing that you are interested in, make sure to reach out to the presenter directly for more information.

We are also working on uploading the poster abstracts and posters to the online Poster Discussion Forum. This is the same online forum that we've been using the past few years, which will allow those who attended the workshop remotely to see what posters were shared. The content should be viewable on the Forum by the first week in April.

If you are interested in helping to plan the 2024 Annual IEP Workshop, our kickoff planning meeting will be in August. If interested, send an email to iep@wildife.ca.gov.

Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you next year!

IEP Program Support Unit