How should a study be designed to ensure that it effectively addresses the identified research question? This workshop will discuss important elements of study design in ecology and conservation including how to identify and distribute sampling units and avoid bias while doing so; how many samples to collect; and what inferences can and cannot be drawn from particular research designs. Throughout, we will use examples to make concepts as clear as possible. As a part of the workshop, we will set exercises in study design for participants and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the designs that participants come up with and ways to improve them to obtain better results.

Ecological data in its raw form is often messy, containing inconsistencies, missing values, and improperly formatted information. This workshop, "Data detox in R: clean, wrangle, and transform your ecological data," is designed to equip participants with the skills necessary to clean and prepare their datasets for analysis using R. Over the course of two hours, attendees will dive deep into key data wrangling tools, learning how to use R packages like dplyr, tidyr, stringr, and lubridate to manipulate and clean their data. Participants will get hands-on experience with essential techniques such as handling missing data, manipulating text strings, reshaping data, and working with dates. Through practical exercises, participants will apply these concepts to real-world ecological datasets, ensuring they walk away with the confidence to clean and prepare their data for rigorous analysis.

This immersive workshop invites participants to observe, listen to, and interpret trees in a way that goes beyond identification. “Reading” trees is both an art and a science—one that reveals how their forms carry the memory of ecological events, cultural ties, and human interactions.

Participants will engage in a walk-on, story-driven exploration, learning to notice and interpret clues such as leaf shapes, bark textures, crown asymmetry, scars, posture, and root structures. These features offer insights into a tree’s past, its resilience, and its role in the landscape.

Rather than focusing on taxonomy, the workshop encourages a deeper connection with nature through reflective observation. It also weaves in traditional knowledge, cultural stories, and local associations—aligning with the SCCS 2025 theme: Communities and People in Conservation. Participants will explore how communities have long read and related to trees through story, myth, and lived experience.

The session culminates in a collaborative storytelling exercise where groups give voice to a tree using the clues they've observed. These creative narratives transform observation into meaning, and meaning into shared experience.

By the end of the session, participants will leave not only with new ways of seeing and sensing trees, but with the confidence to design and lead their own mindful tree walks. This workshop offers a unique, shareable tool for conservation outreach, environmental education, and community engagement.

Many times, we stumble upon interesting research findings through social and print media. Whether it is the science column of the newspaper, or the feed of your social media friends, people tend to pay more attention to interesting and jargon-free narratives, cool and simple graphics, and short, catchy titles! Many conservation journals now use social media to promote their content, and journalists actively seek compelling nature and conservation stories. Research even suggests that actively promoting research findings on social media can increase their visibility. What do journalists look for while covering interesting research findings? What tools and techniques will help researchers to communicate concepts in its simplest but powerful way?

This hands-on workshop addresses these points by exploring published research on conservation communication, the fundamentals of graphic communication, and an introduction to various communication formats. These include crafting press releases for print media, designing still and video posts for social media, and developing blog posts and educational modules for students.

This participant-focused workshop with experienced mentors from research, journalism, and art backgrounds who will address participant queries based on their practical experience in communicating research findings. While the workshop won't delve deeply into each communication channel, it aims to provide an overview of effective techniques and tools with illustrative examples and activities. The goal is to inspire participants to develop their own communication strategies and foster collaborations with journalists and artists to disseminate their findings more effectively.

As part of the India Sand Watch project at Veditum India Foundation, we document and archive river sand mining across India’s rivers. The India Sand Watch platform is an open-data archive of evidence of illegality and violence in the sand mining sector across time and space, that enables and empowers citizens to take collective action through evidence-backed reporting, litigation, activism, research etc. Through the proposed workshop, we will transfer our learnings and enable participants to use this framework and process to build evidence for other environmental threats and challenges.

Our workshop will explore and understand emergent conflicts arising from the present day functioning of India’s environmental governance frameworks, resource-extraction and development paradigms, and ways in which such conflicts can be challenged to create accountability and justice.

The activities and discussions will introduce ideas of data archives, open-data, citizen science & the importance of collaborative & collective action - with practical activities to frame problem statements, identify impacts and stakeholders, and collect evidence for action.

This workshop will equip participants to leverage tools like open-data & citizen science for appropriate interventions in large-scale and daunting challenges.

The workshop offers participants an opportunity to develop skills of visualizing and translating ecological and animal behavior data into creative narratives for conservation outreach and science communication. Effective conservation action requires raising awareness within our communities about the knowledge generated through scientific research. However, public access to this knowledge is often hindered by the difficulty of interpreting technical language in academic journals, forming echo chambers of communication. This also raises important questions: How does science-inspired creative communication include other forms of knowing , such as the insights of indigenous stories and knowledge-holders? How do we incorporate participatory methods and interaction in outreach efforts?

Conservation outreach has been attempting to bridge these gaps through a multidisciplinary collaborative approach—bringing together researchers, creative practitioners, technologists, and authors to reach wider and more diverse audiences. There is growing interest within both scientific and creative communities to collaborate on conservation-focused initiatives. Yet, for many emerging practitioners—whether from research or creative backgrounds—navigating the intersection of data, creativity, and collaboration remains a challenging and uncertain terrain. This workshop seeks to offer clarity in this domain to enthusiasts of science communication and conservation-outreach, by providing an exposure into conveying insights, derived from data through critical and creative thinking, using various forms of storytelling ranging from creative charts to participatory, interactive art. This interactive and experiential learning session will involve sharing inspiration and hands-on training into creative research and information design for conservation.

This interactive workshop introduces participants to the power of visual storytelling as a tool for conservation communication. With mobile technology becoming increasingly accessible, it is now possible for anyone to create compelling narratives that influence public perception and policy. The session begins with introductions and a fun ice-breaker, encouraging participants to reflect on the stories that have moved them and their expectations from the session.

Using simple mobile cameras, participants will learn to observe and compose impactful photographs, understand the art and science of visual framing, and explore how conservation stories can be shaped using everyday tools. The facilitator will explain core concepts such as the rule of thirds, headroom, and types of camera shots long, mid, and close-up each serving a unique narrative purpose.

Through hands-on activities and group collaboration, participants will practice capturing meaningful visuals that convey emotion, setting, and action. A light-hearted photo-guessing game based on popular scenes will reinforce concepts in an engaging way.

By the end of the workshop, participants will walk away with a foundational understanding of how to craft conservation narratives visually an essential skill in today’s attention-driven world. No prior technical expertise is required just a phone camera, curiosity, and a story to tell.

The Empire Floats Back: River Systems and Their Stakeholders

Rivers aren’t just bodies of water—they are the beating heart of our ecosystems, economies, and cultures. They nourish communities, support wildlife, fuel industries, and shape landscapes. But today, our rivers are in trouble—facing mounting threats from climate change, pollution, over-extraction, and uncoordinated human development.

The Empire Floats Back is not your average academic session. This interactive, high-energy workshop dives into the complex, messy, and fascinating world of river conservation through the lens of stakeholder dynamics. Designed for students and early-career researchers eager to tackle real-world environmental challenges, this session fuses science, storytelling, role-play, and collaborative strategy.

You’ll step into the shoes of farmers, policymakers, industrialists, activists, and more in immersive role-playing exercises. You'll negotiate, compromise, and clash over how to manage a hypothetical river under threat—just like in the real world. Then, in interdisciplinary teams, you’ll craft river management strategies that blend ecological science, community voices, and practical policy. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your skills in systems thinking, communication, and collaborative problem-solving.

By the end, you won’t just have a deeper understanding of river conservation—you’ll leave with practical tools, new perspectives, and the confidence to engage in interdisciplinary environmental work that matters.

This workshop is for anyone who’s ever wanted to turn conservation theory into action, learn by doing, and have a bit of fun while navigating the muddy waters of environmental decision-making. Come float ideas, debate dilemmas, and co-create solutions. Because the future of our rivers depends on it—and on you.

This hands-on workshop introduces participants to the use of Arduino, an open-source electronics platform, for building low-cost ecological monitoring tools. Designed for students and early-career conservationists with little or no background in electronics or coding, this session will guide participants through the basics of microcontrollers, sensor integration, and data collection techniques relevant to field ecology.

Through guided activities, participants will learn how to:

Program an Arduino using simple code,

Connect environmental sensors (e.g., light, temperature, sound),

Build a basic data logger to collect field-relevant ecological data.

The session emphasizes interactive learning, where participants not only gain technical skills but also explore real-world conservation applications—such as monitoring habitat conditions, detecting animal presence, or logging climatic data in remote areas. We will also discuss inspiring case studies where DIY electronics have enabled grassroots conservation efforts and empowered communities and researchers alike.

By the end of the workshop, each participant will have created a functioning prototype and will leave with practical knowledge to start building their own conservation devices. This workshop aims to make technology accessible, fun, and impactful for those working at the frontlines of conservation.

No prior experience in electronics or programming is required—just curiosity, enthusiasm, and a willingness to tinker!

The use of acoustic methods in insectivorous bat studies has substantially increased in recent times. Data from acoustic recordings are mainly used to answer questions about occurrence and identification of bat species, and foraging activity in a given time period. However, ecological inferences possible from acoustic data collected overnight, multi-season, or long-term, are seldom realized, mainly due to practical difficulties in processing and analyzing such large amounts of data.

In this workshop, we intend to popularize novel and simple approaches to use long-term acoustic data to study various aspects of bat ecology through efficient processing and analysis methods. We will introduce participants to the simple steps involved in making the best of bat acoustic data and in unambiguous data extractions, to cater to diverse research and monitoring workflows. Specifically, we will 1. introduce participants to efficient use of low-cost and open source detectors to record bats 2. share tips for end-to-end processing and analyses of these data using manual and semi-automated methods, and 3. introduce participants to the latest developments in automated bat data processing. In particular, we will introduce participants to the BatEchoMon, India’s first automated detection and classification system developed by us. We will also describe related workflow processes and analytical components that we have developed for common Indian bat species. Participants will also get access to some of the automated bat call data processing code/s in this interactive and hands-on workshop.