Eco-Stats paper rated in Faculty of 1000

Our recent paper on confounding of mean and variance effects in multivariate analysis has recently been rated as a "Must Read" in the Faculty of 1000, a platform providing post-publication peer-review and selecting only the most important articles in biology and medicine. Just 2% of published articles are highlighted on Faculty of 1000 each month, and I'd say the rate is a lot lower when you get outside of medicine and biotech, so it's a bit of a coup getting an Eco-Stats paper in there!

The review was contributed by Ferdinando Boero and Stanislao Bevilacqua, Universita' del Salento, Italy, and highlights the importance of thinking critically about the properties of methods of data analysis, and how suitable they are to the data at hand.  We think this is a particular issue in multivariate analysis in ecology at the moment.

Welcome Jakub!

Welcome to Jakub Stoklosa, who has joined Eco-Stats fresh out of a PhD on various issues related to capture-recapture modelling, supervised by Prof Richard Huggins at U Melb.  Jakub will be working on fast model selection algorithms for correlated count data, and how to apply them to develop flexible new models for correlated counts.

To find out more about Jakub and his previous pursuits, check out his recent Biometrics article, or his department seminar coming up on May 4 at 4pm, OMB-145.

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!