An interview with Noel Cressie

An interview with Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie of the University of Wollongong, a big name in spatial statistics, advocate of hierarchical modeling in ecology, and author of a key reference text in spatial statistics, and more recently "Statistics for Spatio-temporal data" with Chris Wikle; we discuss all of these topics.

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!