Eco-Stats grant funding for 2012-14

Some good news from the Australian Research Council (ARC) - they have agreed to extend Eco-Stats funding for another three years, offering $100K/year for 2012-14.  The funded project is titled "New approaches to predictive modelling of high-dimensional count data to study climate impacts on ecological communities", and its content reflects recent changes in Eco-Stats research to focus more on the development of predictive modelling approaches (rather than hypothesis testing) for multivariate ecology.  This funding will be used to hire another Research Associate or Research Assistant to join the team and assist in developing new predictive modelling approaches (applications close November 30!).

Congrats to Eve - best talk award!

Eve just won the Landscape Conservation Award, sponsered by the Office of Envrionment and Heritage, for her talk on evaluating whether new "habitat climate" maps better predict biodiversity than current climate maps.  This was judged to be one of the top talks at the UNSW BEES (biology) postgraduate forum, even though it was Eve's first ever attempt at presenting to such an audience.  Nice work Eve!

Science and Maths Exposed

I spoke to a lively bunch of high school students this morning about life as a scientist (and in particular, life as an Eco-Statistician) at "Science and Maths Exposed", UWS Parramatta Campus.  My slides are available here.

Goodbye and good luck, Bene and Alex!

Bene has just landed a job as a postdoc at Cornell Uni, modelling minke populations.  Congrats Bene and good luck!  Alex is also off to the US to start her PhD at Harvard - exciting times.

Hopefully Alex and Bene will both keep us posted on their travels - with the blog waiting patiently for their entries they'll have no excuse!

Recent breakthrough successes

Eco-Stats members have had a busy time of it recently, a big congrats to:

• Yi (Alice) Wang, who was awarded a UNSW Goldstar Award valued at $30,000 for 2011 to continue her fingerprinting research.  These awards are for applicants to the Australian Research Council who submitted an excellent grant proposal which was unlucky not to receive major funding.  Well done, Alice, and good luck in the next round!
• Ian Renner, awarded the EJG Pitman Award at the recent Australian Statistics Conference for best student talk.  See this news article for details.
• Alex Brown, who was accepted into Harvard as a PhD student.  She's off to work with Paul Moorcroft in ecological modelling in August.  Wow!

mvabund v2.2-5.3 online now!

mvabund is a a set of tools for displaying, modeling and analysing multivariate abundance data in community ecology. mvabund v2.2-5.3 has been tested on R-2.13.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Eco-Stats blog! The Eco-Stats Research group is a bunch of researchers at UNSW working in ecological statistics. The main purpose of this blog will be to post updates of what past and present Eco-Statisticians are up to. For more details on what we're about, go to
Here.