Dr Renner it is

Ian Renner has been officially awarded his PhD for a thesis titled "Advances in Presence-Only Methods in Ecology".  Congratulations Ian!  Now to publish some of those chapters..

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!