Workshops
We are delighted to offer a variety of workshops for delegates throughout Ento26. More information on workshops and timings will be available in due course.
Drawing insects with Lizzie Harper
Facilitator: Lizzie Harper, Botanical and Natural History Illustrator
Due to limited capacity, pre-booking is required to ensure an interactive experience for this workshop. The session will be held three times during the conference.
Further details on scheduling and how to reserve your place will be shared soon.
Lizzie Harper, freelance botanical and natural history illustrator, will lead a one hour workshop on drawing insects. Working from specimens in resin, you’ll get to loosen up with quick sketches before spending a little more time working on detailed line drawings of insects using pencil or pen.
Lizzie is known for being an encouraging and enthusiastic tutor, and this workshop is suitable for all abilities.
Lizzie will also be exhibiting, and selling prints and illustrations during the conference
Create a digital field survey project using QGIS & Mergin Maps
Facilitator: Claire Birnie, Maptastic
Join this practical, hands‑on workshop designed for entomologists who want to explore digital data collection in the field using QGIS & Mergin Maps. You’ll explore how GIS technology streamlines surveying, reduces errors, and automates essential data capture such as location, time, environmental conditions, and photographs all within a single workflow.
Through guided exercises, you’ll learn how to prepare spatial layers, create attribute schemas tailored to entomological surveys, and design user‑friendly data entry forms that work seamlessly in outdoor conditions. We’ll cover best practices in symbology, form design, and project setup to ensure your data collection is accurate, consistent, and easy to manage.
Participants will need:
- Laptop with QGIS version 3.40 installed* AND
- Mobile or tablet device with Mergin Maps installed*
*instructions will be provided in advance
Developing an insect careers resource
Facilitator: Fran Sconce, Senior Outreach & Learning Officer, The Royal Entomological Society
The RES is working on a resource to communicate careers in insect science, with an aim to highlight different disciplines, pathways, and backgrounds in entomology, to young people in the UK.
In this workshop, we plan to share the initial version of the resource, hear from delegates about where and when they were first encountered insect careers, and how this resource can be developed to improve accessibility and awareness.
The IWRS Husbandry Database: A Collaborative Resource for Insect Care
Facilitators: Meghan Barrett & Bob Fischer, IWRS
The Insect Welfare Research Society is developing a searchable, open-access database documenting husbandry protocols for arthropod populations managed for research purposes.
Unlike traditional care guides that prescribe a single “correct” approach, this database allows the community to articulate many approaches to arthropod husbandry, reflecting different research contexts, institutional resources, and best judgments about the needs of particular species or under particular experimental constraints.
The goal of this workshop is to introduce the database, solicit feedback to improve its usefulness to the RES community, and encourage protocol contributions.
The workshop will begin with a live demonstration of the database’s core functionality, followed by hands-on time where participants will work together in small groups to evaluate and enrich this resource. First, participants will work in small groups to explore the protocols that currently exist in the database for their assigned species and identify examples of husbandry-relevant information not captured by current submissions. Next, participants will select a species not represented in the database and work in groups or alone to develop a brief submission based on their expertise. Individuals will use the actual submission interface, creating an opportunity to evaluate where guidance may be unclear. This process will highlight any usability issues and help identify the additional resources that would make contribution easier. Finally, participants will share one protocol element they developed and one improvement they’d recommend for the database structure or interface. Participants leave with a concrete sense of how to contribute and, for those who completed submissions during the workshop, will have already begun populating the database with their expertise.
Bewildered Beetles and Content Cockroaches: What does insect welfare look like in UK Zoos?
Facilitator: Lee Johnson, Harper Adams University
Modern Zoological collections are uniquely positioned to not only challenge insect population declines with captive breeding programmes and reintroductions, but to highlight their plight and raise their profile amongst an often-indifferent public – yet across UK collections, numbers and ranges of species held are decreasing.
The reasons are complex, but significant among them is the potential difficulty in balancing display, husbandry and public interaction with relevant and meaningful welfare concerns and assessments.
This workshop forms part of a wider project to develop a specific welfare assessment tool that will enable all zoological collections to easily, consistently and effectively monitor and improve the welfare of terrestrial invertebrates within their care.
The workshop will be an interactive and inclusive environment where we are keen to hear the views of entomologists of all levels, particularly regarding the relevance and reliability of welfare indicators in taxonomic groups of their expertise and experience.
The outcomes of this workshop will directly feed into the next phase of the project where potential welfare indicators will be validated in experimental studies, so please join us for us for your chance to make a vital contribution and help promote insects in zoos and beyond.
