Program | AEMON-J

AEMON-J workshop Program

10 August 2026	Day 1: rLakeHabitat: An Open-Source R Package for Bathymetric Mapping and Aquatic Habitat Quantification
	Workshop Organizers: Sean Bertalot (University of Wyoming) & Tristan Blechinger (University of Wyoming)
	Physical habitat structure shapes nearly every aspect of lake and reservoir ecosystems — from oxygen dynamics and nutrient cycling to biodiversity and productivity. Bathymetry-based approaches are extremely useful for characterizing the availability of key habitat types, including photic littoral zones and stratified pelagic habitats, yet few open-source tools exist that make this analysis accessible to researchers and managers. Here, we introduce rLakeHabitat, an R package designed to streamline bathymetric digital elevation model generation and quantify physical aquatic habitat availability across a range of water levels. The package provides a reproducible, flexible workflow applicable to both natural lakes and managed reservoirs. By lowering the technical barriers to spatially explicit habitat analysis, rLakeHabitat aims to broaden the use of bathymetric approaches in aquatic research and ecosystem management. This workshop is scheduled to run 14:00-17:00 UTC.

11 August 2026	Day 2: How to access petabytes of weather forecasts from your laptop
	Workshop Organizers: Jacob Zwart (USGS) & Alden Keefe Sampson (Dynamical)
	Accessing large-scale meteorological forecasts is often slow and labor‑intensive, but new fast, interoperable tools are easing this burden. dynamical.org offers open, analysis-ready weather data updated nearly in real time, with a rapidly expanding catalog of global operational models. The platform enables applications such as hydrologic forecasting, algal bloom prediction, and NASA-supported snow‑cover estimation. Ongoing development will broaden support for major global models and emerging AI-based forecasts, helping users apply modern weather data more effectively. In this workshop, we will show participants how to access these data from their laptops. This workshop is scheduled to run 14:00-17:00 UTC.

12 August 2026	Day 3: Linking NEON aquatic observational and instrument data to answer critical questions in aquatic ecology at the continental scale
	Workshop Organizers: Zach Nickerson (NEON) and Steph Parker (NEON)
	The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provides open data from a continental-scale network of monitoring locations, including 34 aquatic sites stationed in stream, river, and lake ecosystems. This hands-on coding workshop will teach participants how to access, interpret, manipulate and visualize NEON aquatic data within the R statistical software environment. The focus of the workshop will be on linking aquatic macroinvertebrate community data with water quality, stream discharge, and other sensor data. This workshop is scheduled to run 14:00-17:00 UTC.