Sofia Afoncheva

„The Survivors’ Guide to Stable Isotope Ecology IV" (SGSIE) was originally planned as an intensive 2-weeks course with the lab activities in Siracusa in Sicily (Italy). I registered for the course in early 2020, but due to the pandemic the course was cancelled and shifted to the year 2021. Turned out, the pandemic in 2021 is still far from over and the course was transformed into 5 days online course.

SGSIE was really intensive course with daily 5-6 hours of lectures, video demonstrations and questions & answers parts. We had a vivid group of highly-professional and easy to talk to tutors from UK, Chile, USA, Canada and „survivors“, the participants, from all over the globe from Canada to Fiji and Australia.

Each day consisted of several lectures, covering broad number of topics in stable isotope ecology (such as stable isotopes in trophic ecology, isoscapes, drivers of isotopes variation) followed by data workshops with the tutors and additional videos for studying offline.

Some days of the course started with live demonstrations of stable isotope analysis performed in the lab of ELEMENTAR, the company producing isotope ratio mass spectrometers and other machines for analysis of organic and inorganic elements. Especially useful for myself I found the data workshops, during which we could get familiar with the stable isotope data sheets coming out from the labs where lots of us send the samples for analysis and also discuss the challenges of using mixing models. We spent one day of the course discussing the principles of design and execution of stable isotope study, that was especially valuable for me for planning the future experiments.

Although 2021 „survivors“ did not have an opportunity to meet and discuss their projects, ideas and share some fun experiences in person on a beautiful island of Sicily,  we gained  a lot of knowledge and build up new networks. Tutors and organizers were especially helpful and open to any questions not only during course time, but also afterwards so we can still keep contact with them. I would like to thank the organizers of SGSIE course and tutors for the incredible full of work 1 week course and GLOMAR for giving me the possibility to participate in it.