YoMos 2025 Recap

youngmodellers
Jun 4
4 min read

Thank you for a wonderful week at the 2025 YoMos workshop in Oehrenstock, Ilmenau! This text captures some impressions from the week, for all who were there to dwell in fond memories and for all who want to join at a future point to get an idea of what a YoMos workshop could be like.

All fun and games: Warm-up presented by Elizabeth and Jakob on Monday

We are Ecologists, we are Modellers and we are Young (at least in ‘scientific age’), so are we all occupying the same niche? Much less than you might think!

One of our warmup games on Monday was a sorting game: after arranging everyone in a gradient of sock length, a more serious task was to sort by how theoretical vs applied our research questions and methods are. Even though the applied maths/physics gang (on the left) and the data science crew (on the right) at first seemed quite surprised about each other, any hesitation to ask questions and get invested in each others’ work vanished fast – over shared kitchen duty at the latest.

Community is made in the kitchen

Let’s be honest: YoMos is a workshop for (PhD) students organised by students, so when we call it a hands-on workshop, that includes a shared responsibility for everyone to co-create the space. A few of us were in charge (and the team this year was absolutely lovely), but what all of the participants brought to the table (metaphorically and literally) was what filled YoMos with life. Everyone this year was so invested and many seemed to feel quite at home in the community we formed with each passing day of the week.

Daily business in the log cabin: Talks, workshops, exchange sessions

We had a comparably big group this year with lots of ideas for workshops – so we admit that the schedule was quite packed! Still, every participant got the opportunity to present their work, some were far advanced, some still in the conceptual phase. A non-exhaustive list of topics includes: spatial models for bird and bee movement in space and time, forest biomass, diversity, changes and restoration, agroecology, ecological and genetic networks, eco-evo models, biodiversity-ecosystem functions, biodiversity and language diversity, urban ecology, ecotoxicology, model-data coupling, machine-learning…

Student-led workshops already started on Monday as well, with Johannes advertising for the use of Julia language for modelling (a recurring topic of conversation throughout the week, sadly not sponsored though), and diversified on Tuesday with workshops on R package RangeShiftR by Charly and Landcover maps with Google Earth Engine by Elizaveta. In parallel, Neele and Jakob gave an introduction to GitHub and incorporating Copilot into the workflow (sparking a debate on usage of AI in science and beyond that flared up on several occasions in the next days as well). A shoutout for all of you for putting some extra effort into YoMos!

A special thank you also goes out to our keynote speakers: Lisa Hülsmann, Thilo Gross, and Phillip Papastefanou. Lisa happily joined the sock comparison and other warmup games on Monday and then opened the sessions on Tuesday morning with a keynote talk highlighting the importance of Tree demography in statistical and simulation models, followed by a workshop/exchange session discussing good practice and obstacles in access & sharing ecological data and code. Thilo joined us for the whole week and happily brought wisdom and controversy into discussions whenever he got the chance. His keynote on “One ring to rule them all? A perspective for modelling complex systems” made everyone chuckle – and then think about the philosophy behind modelling. Phillip came to us from Jena by bike and gave us insights into “Modelling Forest Drought Impact: The Vital Role of Plant Hydraulics“. We enjoyed the sunny exchange session on research culture and his shared excitement for forest ecology during the excursion on Thursday!

Excursion: Remodelling the Thuringian forest for current and future threats

The theme of YoMos 2025 was clearly woody. As ecologists by heart, we aim to host our workshop weeks close to interesting natural sites, even though this means the locations can get quite remote. But what a great opportunity to get outdoors in the morning or after sessions, to get some lone time or explore nature together with others, lots of great bird sightings (black woodpecker, red kite, dunnock) included!. After most peoply had hiked or run (phew) up and down the steep hill behind our seminar houses, we again took the path past the sheep and shepherd dog pasture on Thursday, this time accompanied by two rangers from the Thuringian forest biosphere reserve (easily recognisable by proper ranger hats and professional attitude in the photo). They shared lots of information on the current state and challenges of the planted forest remnants and showed us how the Thuringian forest might be transformed to better withstand climate change effects like dryness and pests like bark beetles without forgetting the local human population economically dependent on their forest. Lisa and Jakob kindly translated to English and of course, our forest modellers had loads of questions for them as well!

Thursday night, we celebrated our last evening with a summer camp vibe: Sharing stick bread and roasted (risky) peanuts by a cozy campfire! Like the stick bread, we had to rotate by a certain frequency to not freeze our backs in the cold, clear spring night air!

Everyone who joined our 2025 workshop could probably tell you a dozen different particularities that didn’t find mention in this subjective recap text. So if you find someone with a YoMos sticker padded on their laptop, ask them about it!