Introducing the mvabund package (and why multivariate statistics in ecology is a bit like Rick Astley...)

http://www.methodsinecologyandevolution.org/view/0/podcasts.html#vid-warton

You can read the paper at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2012.00190.x/full

Welcome Francis, welcome back Alice!

A big welcome to Francis Hui, who has started a PhD this year, co-supervised by Scott Foster at CSIRO, Hobart.  Francis will be extending finite mixture modellimg methods for the analysis of multi-species data in ecology.  This modelling approach has a lot of potential, allowing us to better estimate and understand cross-species patterns in environmental response.

And welcome back to Alice, back from maternity leave.  She will be extending the functionality of the mvabund package (for hypothesis testing of multivariate abundance data in ecology), and evaluating these tools via computationally intensive simulations.  Great to have you back on board, Alice!

Student prizes at IBS conference - congrats to Eve and Ian!

The International Biometrics Society (Australasian region) conference was held at Kiama in December 2011, "Biometrics at the Blowholes".  A huge congrats to Eve Slavich, who won the prize for best student talk (and at her first conference!), and to Ian Renner, who got the runners-up prize.  Wow, nice one guys!

Here's a picture of a proud David with the two prize-winners...

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!