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Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland

Annual Science Meeting

18-20 November 2025

Technology & Innovation Centre, 99 George Street, Glasgow, G1 1RD

Have a question about the MASTS Annual Science Meeting? Please feel free to get in touch via masts@st-andrews.ac.uk – we would love to hear from you. 

MASTS ASM 2025 

18th-20th November at the Technology & Innovation Centre (TIC), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

The fifteenth MASTS Annual Science Meeting is a cross-disciplinary event that brings together members of the marine science community, with the aim of promoting and communicating research excellence and forging new scientific collaborations. The event will take place in-person in Glasgow.

The first two days will bring together expert plenary speakers and contributed talks, panel sessions and e-posters outlining the latest research and management practices that address key topics related to marine science and management in the face of global climate change and a biodiversity crisis. Alongside our general science sessions, the event will include special topic sessions, and plenty of opportunities to network. There will also be a ceilidh to enjoy! The third day is devoted to workshops.

Keynote speakers:
  • TBC
Call for Abstracts

The call for abstracts will open in early summer. We will invite talk and eposter abstracts.

If you would like to host a special session at the 2025 ASM please email us 

 

All presenters are encouraged to not solely focus on past and current research but reflect on gaps of knowledge and future research directions. Talks should be accessible to other disciplines, by avoiding jargon and keeping technical details simple.

 

* An ePoster is an electronic version of the traditional poster boards, and is displayed on a TV monitor/screen. The ePoster may include text, figures and images, as well as video and animation. Read our guidelines here. Eposters will need to be submitted to masts@st-andrews.ac.uk before close on xx/10/25.

We encourage all presenters to read our general accessibility guidance here to ensure our event is available to all.

Details of confirmed workshops are below.

Workshop information

Workshop organiser: Dr Ed Lavender

This workshop will introduce state-space modelling and model-based inference for animal-tracking data. The workshop will focus on the patter R package as a tool for model-based inference. Participants will gain the knowledge and expertise required to understand (a) where the patter sits within the animal-tracking ecosystem, (b) when to reach for the package and (c) how to apply the package with their own datasets.

Workshop rationale

  • We are in the ‘golden age’ of animal tracking. A suite of electronic tagging and tracking technologies is now used to track aquatic animals across the globe. The data present enormous opportunities, but require the application of appropriate statistical methods for analysis.
  • State-space models have emerged as a powerful modelling framework that represents individual movements and the processes connecting movements to observations. However, fitting state-space models to animal-tracking data can be difficult and computationally expensive.

Workshop outline

  • This workshop will introduce state-space modelling and model-based inference for animal-tracking data, with a focus on the patter
  • Depending on participant expertise, the workshop will comprise (a) an interactive presentation that builds the narrative for state-space modelling in movement ecology and introduces model-based inference plus (b) a practical session in which participants will learn to fit models to their own or example datasets using patter.
  • patter fits state-space models to tracking datasets using particle filtering and smoothing algorithms, with a focus on data from aquatic animals in receiver arrays. patter is written in R, with a performant Julia patter users can estimate the underlying (‘latent’) states (locations) of tagged animals through time, plus characteristics of the movement and observation processes. The estimates support refined downstream analyses of movements, space use, home ranges, residency and habitat selection.

Participant guidance

  • We hope the workshop will benefit participants that have an interest in animal tracking (especially passive acoustic telemetry users), ecological modelling and/or R and Julia We will assume minimal prior knowledge.
  • Participants should bring a laptop, with R and Julia You should also install the patter and Patter.jl R and Julia packages, by following the instructions on GitHub (https://github.com/edwardlavender/patter). Experienced participants may also wish to install Wahoo.jl (https://github.com/scheidan/Wahoo.jl).
  • For queries, please contact Edward Lavender (lavender@eawag.ch).

Organiser: Prof Rob Briers

This course will introduce postgraduates, early career researchers, and anyone new to Geographical Information Systems, to the use of GIS, and specifically the Open Source QGIS program. Following an initial overview of some of the key concepts and ideas, the focus will be on hands-on practical use of GIS for common mapping and analysis tasks. The course will cover sourcing, import and display of different data sources along with a selection of the major analysis procedures and effective mapping techniques.

Please bring a laptop with QGIS preinstalled (downloadable from https://qgis.org/download/, choosing the Long Term version, rather than the Latest). Other files needed can be downloaded in advance via a link provided nearer the time.

Organisers: Roseanna Wright, Charlotte Miskin-Hymas and Alice Rysiecki 

20 places available – please bring your own laptop

Data management is a critical skill that underpins the integrity, efficiency, and impact of research. It is a foundational aspect of conducting rigorous and reproducible research, making it essential for students and early career researchers to develop competence in this area. MEDIN workshops are designed to enhance attendees’ knowledge and skills in marine data management. Training will cover data management planning and tips for effective data management during a project as well as resources such as the MEDIN Discovery Metadata Standard, the MEDIN Data Guidelines, and controlled vocabularies. The MEDIN Discovery Metadata Standard enables users to generate standardised information about their datasets and upload them to an online portal, facilitating data discovery. The MEDIN portal provides access to over 18,000 existing marine datasets, which can be used to provide context during research projects. Additionally, the MEDIN Data Guidelines offer a structured approach to collecting information about sampled data, ensuring it can be interpreted by others in the future. More information about MEDIN workshops can be found here.

Expected Outcomes/Outputs:

  • Create a Data Management Plan.
  • Explain how MEDIN data management practices can reduce costs and risks and provide examples of how extending the original purpose of data adds value.
  • Explain the role of metadata in each step of the process data life cycle: from data collection, management, publication, to usage.
  • Explain the importance of using controlled vocabularies.
  • Identify relevant controlled vocabularies.
  • Search controlled vocabularies for terms that accurately describe marine data content according to MEDIN standards and guidelines.
  • Accurately represent geospatial data using appropriate tools and techniques.
  • Define discovery metadata.
  • Explain how the MEDIN discovery metadata standard is applied on the MEDIN portal.
  • Use the MEDIN online metadata editor to create MEDIN-compliant discovery metadata records.
  • Apply MEDIN data guidelines to create consistent datasets with comprehensive metadata, ensuring ease of sharing, understanding, and reuse.
  • Explain the role of metadata in each step of the process of data collection, management, publication, and usage.
  • Discuss the considerations for data reuse.

Organiser: Dr Neil Banas

Max: 25 spaces

The MASTS Working Group on Migration and Prey Energyscapes in Changing Oceans aims to find new common ground and shared questions between movement ecologists and ocean modellers looking at the same food chains but with opposite perspectives: from top predators looking down, from lower trophic levels looking up.

There is a long tradition of efforts to relate behaviour and change in mobile marine predator populations to change in underlying climate and ocean drivers—or conversely, to translate what we know about the past and future of ocean physics and lower trophic levels into implications for migration, movement, and population resilience in fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Making these leaps across trophic levels is a perennial grand challenge, but as animal-tracking observing technology improves, as modelling methods for describing seascapes, individuals, and populations advance – and as we bring together these complementary perspectives of the oceanographic and higher predator research communities – new types of synthesis become possible.


We invite short talks from across the MASTS community addressing this theme from all directions, such as:
• Studies of population dynamics and movement (e.g. foraging, migration) of mobile predators such as fish, marine mammals and seabirds that could benefit from oceanographic insight, data, perspective, and methods;
• Conversely, studies of past and future change in physical, biogeochemical and lower-trophic level environments that could be enhanced by a movement ecologist perspective, datasets and methods to explore consequences for the higher predators ranging across them.
• New mathematical and data-science approaches to quantifying, visualising and building mechanistic understanding of the drivers of higher predator behaviour across multiple spatial, temporal and trophic levels.


The Working Group will present initial results from a pilot synthesis project on Atlantic seabirds in winter in relation to zooplankton distributions. Ample discussion time will be reserved to identify promising, unexplored lines of contact between movement ecologists, oceanographers, and mathematical modellers, and to plan an expanded field of pilot projects for the Working Group’s second year. We welcome ongoing and exploratory work on this theme as well as completed studies.

Expected Outcomes/Outputs:
• Greatly expanded and diversified engagement with the Working Group. This event is an important opportunity to set an expanded agenda for our in-person, small-group technical work in spring 2026.
• Matchmaking among community members with complementary expertise, leading to new collaborations on proposals, papers, and PhD supervision teams.

Want to be an Exhibitor at the conference?

The facilities of the Technology & Innovation Centre are available to exhibitors during the MASTS ASM. Exhibitors will be in the main conference lobby and are expected to stay for the duration of the conference. To have a stand at the conference please contact us at masts@st-andrews.ac.uk.

ASM Organising Committee

The MASTS ASM is being organised by Dr Emma Defew (MASTS Programme Coordinator) 

If you would like to get involved or have a query, please drop us an email.

You can stay up to date by joining our email list or following us on LinkedIn

Access Statement

The event will take place in a variety of rooms in the Technology & Innovation Centre (TIC). A full access guide for the TIC is here. Including information regarding accessible toilet locations, lifts and outside access. Directly from the TIC “Events in the Technology & Innovation Centre: an A–Z Guide

The event’s reception and posters will be in the main conference lobby on the ground floor at the TIC. Seating is available around the lobby, although this is limited and we ask that this is prioritised for disabled attendees. There are plenty of quiet areas around the TIC. Dietary requirements will be catered for.

Address: 

Technology & Innovation Centre, 
99 George Street, 
Glasgow, G1 1RD

+44 (0) 141 444 7000

If you have any questions, requests, or concerns about access at this event, please contact MASTS at masts@st-andrews.ac.is

Student Prizes

We were delighted that IMarEST had kindly agreed to sponsor the student prizes for the 2024 ASM.

You must be a student member of IMarEST to be eligible to win a prize, but membership is free. Sign up here

Congratulations to the 2024 winners:

  • Best poster – Thomas Baxter (University of St Andrews) – Hatchery reared European lobster (Homarus gammarus) release behaviour and impact of lobster hatchery operation.

  • Runner up poster – Laura Thomson (University of Strathclyde) – Honeycomb: modelling the effects of oil and gas structures on the abundance and distribution of saithe (Pollachius virens) in the North Sea.

  • Best talk – Magnus Janson (Edinburgh Napier University) – Assessing associated biodiversity and status of European flat oyster beds using analysis of soundscapes, eDNA and visual survey.

  • Runner up talk – Tim Awbery (SAMS) – Using Dynamic Habitat Suitability Models Based on a Twenty-Year Dataset to Assess the Potential Risk of Entanglement of Minke Whales.

Don’t forget to stay up to date on the ASM by following us on Twitter or LinkedIn! #MASTSasm2024

See what has featured in our previous Annual Science Meetings here

Check out some of the images from the ASM on the slideshow below.

MASTS Resources

We’re working behind the scenes to bring you a suite of useful, and updateable, resources including: 

  • Find an expert
  • Find facilities & equipment
  • MASTS Publications

 

If you would like to be updated when the resources section is live please let us know.