Author Archives: Eleni Matechou
SE@K paper accepted for publication in Annals of Applied Statistics
The paper, co-authored by Eleni Matechou, Rachel McCrea, Byron Morgan from SE@K and Richard Griffiths and Darryn Nash from DICE, presents novel models for removal data which do not rely on the assumption of population closure.
SE@K project awarded Faculty of Sciences Internationalisation Fund
Eleni was awarded £750 from the Faculty of Sciences Internationalisation Mobility Fund to visit Professor Alessio Farcomeni at Sapienza University, Rome and work on “Modelling migration patterns of wildlife populations using Bayesian non-parametric hidden Markov population ecology models with individual and temporal heterogeneity”.
Statistical Ecology Research Festival (SERF)
The Statistical Ecology Research Festival (SERF) is a one day event for postgraduate students in Statistics and/or Ecology. SERF is a great opportunity for statistics students to learn more about ecological data, how they are collected, what specific questions ecologists are trying to answer by collecting the data and the practical problems that can be encountered in the field. Ecology students will have the chance to learn more about the wide array of statistical techniques used to analyse ecological data, the challenges faced from a statistician’s perspective and emerging areas of statistical research.
SERF will comprise of oral presentations and posters, a round table discussion which will allow attendees to share their research and establish better connections, a discussion on future funding opportunities and a networking reception at the end of the day.
It will be a wonderful opportunity for research postgraduates from both statistical and ecological disciplines to interact with each other and showcase their research. As a result of sharing knowledge among attendees, SERF will generate ideas and approaches for future research in statistical ecology as well as partnerships among participants.
SE@K
We are the Statistical Ecology @Kent (SE@K) group at the School of Mathematics, Statistics & Actuarial Science at University of Kent. We are members of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE). SERF is fully funded by Eastern Academic Research Consortium (Eastern ARC) in order to encourage interdisciplinary research.
Submitting an abstract
SERF is open to postgraduate research students/postdocs in statistical ecology or quantitative ecology, but priority will be given to those from Eastern ARC partner institutions (University of Kent, Essex and East Anglia).
Abstracts of no more than 500 words for a talk of 15 minutes including questions must be submitted using the online submission form accompanied by the name of the applicant and their institution and contact details by the 8th May 2016.
The abstracts will be judged on quality, novelty and relevance to SERF. The abstracts selected for oral presentation will be chosen to ensure a wide range of topics are covered during the day. Successful applicants will be notified by the 16th May.
Registration
Registration is free. Lunch and refreshments will be provided free of charge to all participants.
Please note that a limited number of travel expenses (up to £50) are available for presenters whose abstracts were accepted for oral presentations.
Programme for the day
Coming soon…
Location and directions
SERF will take place on the 7th June at the University of Kent in Canterbury. The talks will take place in Cornwallis Octagon Lecture Theatre 3 and the round table discussion and networking in Cornwallis East Seminar Room 2. Both venues are one-minute away from Darwin College bus stop. The link below gives more information on travel and direction. Direction Guidelines
Follow-up material
Presentation slides and posters will be published here. Coming soon…
Contact information
If you have further enquiries, please contact us at SERF@kent.ac.uk
SE@K project awarded Sciences Faculty Competition scholarship
The project, titled Studying migration patterns of UK bird populations using Bayesian nonparametric models, was proposed by Dr Eleni Matechou in collaboration with Dr Alison Johnston from the British Trust for Ornithology and Professor Jim Griffin from SMSAS.
Summary of the proposal: The PhD student on this collaborative project will develop and use novel and sophisticated statistical models, namely Bayesian nonparametric models, to understand patterns of bird migration within the UK. The data to be analysed refer to bird species that breed in the UK and spend the winter in Africa. These are collected by the BTO as part of the Constant Effort Sites (CES) monitoring scheme. The analyses will describe the migration patterns, phenology, population sizes and distribution of these species. Links between these demographic parameters and environmental covariates will be explored to explain the mechanisms leading to patterns and changes (for example, climate change leading to earlier migration). The results will also be used to inform conservation management strategies. As well as a number of scientific manuscripts describing the statistical models and the ecological processes, the student will also produce freely-available software that will be used by the BTO in the future and by any interested researchers to fit the models to their own data.
Congratulations to Ming for her IBC bursary
SE@K student Ming Zhou was awarded £500 for attending IBC 2016 in Victoria BC, Canada.
Ming’s application was judged by the Biometric Society and the Fisher Memorial Trust.
As a recipient of a bursary Ming will provide a one page report after the conference summarising how she has benefited scientifically from attendance, to be published on the Regional website.
Occupancy workshop
Diana, Eleni and Rachel gave a 3 day long workshop on occupancy modelling.
The workshop took place 13-15 of January at the University of Kent.
The 20 or so participants were exposed to the ideas behind basic and advanved occupancy models from classical and Bayesian perspectives.
There were theory and practical sessions, the latter covering R and Presence.
On the last day, participants discussed about their own projects and data with the SE@K group. All of the projects were interesting and some will undoubtedly lead to more collaborations in the future.
Eleni gave invited talk at the META workshop
Eleni presented her work on
Modelling individual migration patterns using a Bayesian nonparametric approach for capture-recapture data
at the first META (Mathematical Ecology: theory and applications) workshop, which took place at the University of Birmingham.
The workshop, titled
Analytical and computational methods for multiscale ecology,
was partly funded by the London Mathematical Society and brought together academics and PhD students interested in models for ecological phenomena http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/N.B.Petrovskaya/META.htm
Eleni gave a seminar at the BTO
Eleni presented her work on models for stopover and related data sets at the BTO in Thetford on the 23rd of October. The talk covered both standard and more recent stopover models applied to data on migrating and breeding birds, breeding great crested newts and common blue butterflies.