CES plays an important role in promoting science through training, capacity building and communication. We do this in part through our support of student conferences and with training programmes for managers. CES also plans to establish a museum and will soon consolidate its herbarium towards the dual purposes of establishing repositories for collections carried out by CES faculty and students, and building an interface with the public. The department already has extensive collections of plants, insects, fish, amphibians and reptiles, and tissue collections that will be archived and made available to researchers.

Young Ecologists Talk and Interact (YETI) is a national conference of young researchers in the fields of animal behaviour, ecology, evolution and conservation science. YETI, started in 2009, is the first of its kind in the country to bring together and provide a national platform for students and young researchers to share their work and ideas in the fields of ecology and conservation. This conference grew out of a small conference held in 2008 at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NBCS-TIFR), Bangalore, by research students from CES and other institutions (SMEECS – Students’ Meeting in Ecology Evolution and Conservation Sciences). From the next year, it expanded to include participants from all over India, becoming YETI in 2009. This is a unique annual conference, entirely organised by and for students. With a growing interest in biodiversity, wildlife and conservation in our country, YETI has been and continues to be a platform dedicated to the quintessential questions of academic pursuit for holistic understanding of ecology and conservation research in the country. The overwhelming enthusiasm of researchers has been reflected in the previous conferences with growing numbers of participants across different regions of the country: the first meeting - SMEECS 2008 (Bangalore – Mysore region based) at NCBS, Bangalore had a participation of 122; YETI 2009 and 2010, both held at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, had a turnover of 262 and 450 students respectively. Most recently, YETI was conducted in December 2011 in Guwahati, and attracted more than 250 students, many for the first time from Northeast India. Read more on YETI-2011.