2024 Group Retreat!
The CCT Data Science team just wrapped up our 2024 annual retreat at the Santa Rita Experimental Range research station! Annual retreats are an opportunity for our team members to get together in the same place - in this case, the beautiful mountain scrub of the SRER - to talk about accomplishments and lessons learned from 2023, chart goals and mission for 2024, and bond as a team over, among other things, woodrats and escape rooms.
We had a lot to celebrate this retreat. In 2023, we successfully completed follow up work on the Arizona Meteorological Network, further developed the volcalc package and published about it, made progress on the camera trapping platform Sparcd, and helped create a visualization tool for a statewide needs assessment, amongst other projects. We started work on some interesting new projects on red squirrel, water potential, green stormwater, and forest inventory data.
We ran lots of workshops, including a new 3-part workshop series on ggplot2 and the fourth iteration of the successful Reproducibility in R workshop series. From a personnel side, in February, our previous leader David LeBauer moved on to new opportunities, and Kristina stepped up to the director role. We added a new team member Renata Diaz, who has already been making many excellent contributions to our group and collaborative projects.
This retreat was the first time our whole team, with all its current members, got together in person. Turns out, we work together pretty well - once work was done, we solved an escape room with (near) perfect accuracy and great rigor, thanks to our collective dedication to code breaking.
In 2024, we’re looking forward to collaborations new and old, including the launch of the PSInet water potential RCN, a handful of community-building events including Tucson Women in Data Science conference, and some new trainings, such as the Bayesian learning group, alongside our successful workshops and workshop series.
Finally, we found the time to enjoy the natural beauty of the Santa Ritas. We had a rodent visitor for the morning of the retreat. And, to wrap things up, we watched birds and took a hike near Mount Wrightson.
