Slides from Eco-Stats Symposium now on-line

http://www.eco-stats.unsw.edu.au/slides.html

Interview with Trevor Hastie

An interview with Trevor Hastie, The John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences
at Stanford, for Methods in Ecology and Evolution.  We discuss a recent response he wrote to a 2012 MEE paper by Andy Royle et al.

TIES conference in Anchorage, Alaska

Congratulations to Francis Hui who battled 22 hours of sunlight a day, got within meters of a wild moose, saw a cool ice glacier and earned an honorable mention in the student category for his presentation: "Variable selection in multi-species mixture modeling" at the 23rd annual International Environmetrics Society conference in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, 2013. Well done!

Eco-Stats now on Twitter, and Facebook

Eco-Stats is now on twitter, @ecostats
and on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/ecostats.unsw

God help us all.

Rumble in the Jungle - SAMs vs separate species SDMs

Our manuscript, To mix or not to mix: comparing the predictive performance of mixture models versus separate species distribution models, has just been accepted by Ecology. A preprint is now available at http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/12-1322.1

In it, we compare the predictive performance of separate species SDMs and Species Archetype Models (SAMs) on several multi-species datasets. SAMs is a recently developed statistical tool that clusters species based on their environmental response into archetypal response groups. To see who wins the bout, SAMs or separate species SDMs, view the paper!

Eco-Stats Symposium program now available

The final program for the Eco-Stats Symposium has now been released.  I'm delighted with the line-up, it looks like a pretty exciting group of speakers!

Fine wine and arcsine asinine

Congratulations to David Warton and Francis Hui for winning the UNSW Evolution & Ecology Research Centre's Citation Classic Award. Their paper, Warton, D. I., and Hui, F.K.C. (2011) The arcsine is asinine: the analysis of proportions in ecology. Ecology 92: 3-10. DOI:10.1890/10-0340.1, received 44 web of knowledge citations in 2012. Many statisticians will agree that that is an impressive statistic.
The two were awarded with a fine bottle of wine, which presumably has already been consumed.