CMI-Soil Bioengineering

September 15-16, 2010
Coast Hillcrest Hotel, Revelstoke BC

Instructor: David Polster, Polster Environmental Services
Cost: $350.00 + $42.00 HST = $392.00 to be paid before the course.
Course fee includes: Instruction, course manual, and coffee breaks (not lunch). For the field trip day we provide a bag lunch and bottled juice. Participants are responsible for their own hotel arrangements. Car-pooling will be required for the field trip day.

Soil bioengineering is an applied science that uses live plant materials to perform an engineering function such as slope stabilization, soil erosion control, or seepage control. This two day course will focus on soil bioengineering techniques and options involved in restoration and reclamation of damaged ecosystems using a combination of structural materials, vegetative cuttings and other specialized methods. The first day is a classroom session. The second day is a hands-on field day.

** In British Columbia, this course has been approved for 4 Continuing Education credits in pest management for people holding an Industrial Vegetation pesticide applicator certificate.

For more details, course outlines, and to register, please visit:

Columbia Mountain Institute - Ecological Approaches to Invasive Plant Management

September 13-14, 2010
Coast Hillcrest Hotel, Revelstoke BC

Instructor: David Polster, Polster Environmental Services
Cost: $350.00 + $42.00 HST = $392.00 to be paid before the course.
Course fee includes: Instruction, course manual, and coffee breaks (not lunch). For the field trip day we provide a bag lunch and bottled juice. Participants are responsible for their own hotel arrangements. Car-pooling will be required for the field trip day.

This two day course will present an ecological approach to invasive plant management, where vegetation management systems are designed to work with natural successional processes. The first day is a classroom session, and the second is a field day with the participants evaluating sites. This is an intensive, content-heavy course. A course manual is supplied.

** In British Columbia, this course has been approved for 6 Continuing Education credits in pest management and 2 Continuing Education credits in application technology, for people holding Industrial Vegetation pesticide applicator certificates.

** In Alberta, this course has been approved for 6 credits in pest management and 2 credits in application technology, in the landscape applicator class of certificate.

For more details, course outlines, and to register, please visit: http://www.cmiae.org/Events

This course does not include instruction on the use of pesticides.
The point of this course is to avoid the need to use pesticides.

Public Participation Skills for Natural Resource Managers
October 4-5, 2010
Hillcrest Hotel, Revelstoke BC

Instructor: Dr. Ajit Krishnaswamy, FORREX Forum for Research and Extension in Natural Resources
Class size: Class size is limited to 25 people.
Cost: $350.00 plus $42.00 HST = $392.00
Course fee includes: Instruction, course materials and resources, lunch on the second day, coffee breaks with goodies. Participants are responsible for other meals and their hotel arrangements.

This 1.5 day course (beginning at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time on October 4) will introduce the basic concepts and skills for planning and implementing a public participation process. Although participation is widely recognized as a critical aspect of natural resource management, and is a regulatory requirement for a variety of environmental and natural resource management processes, few resource managers have had formal training or professional development opportunities in this field. Many practitioners "do" participation every day, but do not have the opportunity to reflect on their practice or to contemplate ways to do it better. This course will provide this opportunity, by using the collective experience of participants themselves as the key learning content. The course will also provide a suite of resources that allow these activities to be grounded in some basic common concepts, and a set of tools that can be adopted and adapted by practitioners.

Registration, course outlines, and more information is available at our website:  http://www.cmiae.org/Events

from Jackie Morris, Executive Director
Columbia Mountains Institute of Applied Ecology
Box 2568, Revelstoke BC, Canada V0E 2S0
Phone and Fax: 250-837-9311
office@cmiae.org | www.cmiae.org

 THIS COURSE IS FULL.  We will run the course again as demand warrents, so please let us know if you are interested. Send a note to office@cmiae.org .

Instructor: Dr. Carl Schwarz, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, at Simon Fraser University (http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz/)
Class size: Class size is limited to 16 people
Cost: $600.00 plus HST = $672.00
Pre-requisites: Basic knowledge of regression and ANOVA (e.g. the Statistical Refresher Course)

For more details, course outlines, and to register, please visit http://www.cmiae.org/

Environmental monitoring often looks at trends over time. Environmental impact assessments want to know if trends over time differ between control and impact sites. Statistical methods for the analysis of trends over time use many of the same methods as the analysis of experimental data (e.g. ANOVA, regression) but must now deal with problems such as autocorrelation and process error. This course is offered as a two OR three day course. If you wish to leave after two days you would have the step/regression trend and the simple Before and After Controlled Impact design (BACI) components of the course. The third day will be devoted to the more complex BACI experiments.

Instructor: Dr. Carl Schwarz, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, at Simon Fraser University (http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz/)
Class size: Class size is limited to 16 people. Register early; this course always fills quickly.
Cost: $600.00 plus HST = $672.00
Pre-requisites: A "basic" knowledge of statistics, i.e. usually a single course somewhere in your background.

For more details, course outlines, and to register, please visit http://www.cmiae.org/

“The earth is flat (p<0.5).”

Many scientific studies are full of statistical jargon, tables of averages and other statistics, and results of statistical tests which purport to prove a certain hypothesis. The purpose of this course is to review some of the basic sampling and experiment designs used by ecologists and to understand exactly what can and cannot be extracted from a set of data. With the advent of modern statistical packages, the analysis of data is fairly easy, but it is far too easy to get nonsense results. This three day course will also review common pitfalls in the analysis of data.