SE@K student Bee Kumphakarm was awarded £500 for attending IBC 2016 in Victoria BC, Canada from the Biometric Society and the Fisher Memorial Trust.
Emily and Byron attend the international symposium “Future 4 Butterflies in Europe”
Emily and Byron attended the international symposium “Future 4 Butterflies in Europe” in Wageningen, Netherlands. Emily gave a talk at a workshop on butterfly monitoring in Europe entitled “Recent developments for modelling butterfly monitoring data: GAM and GAI” and gave a talk at the conference entitled “Dynamic models for butterfly monitoring data”. Byron gave a talk entitled “Modelling migrant butterfly species data”.
Paper: A generalized abundance index for seasonal invertebrates
Emily and Byron along with Stephen Freeman, Tom Breton and David Roy, have just had the paper “A generalized abundance index for seasonal invertebrates” published in Biometrics online early : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/biom.12506/abstract
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.
Congratulations to SE@K PhD students for grant to support the Statistical Ecology Research Festival
Congratulations to Anita Jeyam, Marina Jimenez-Munoz, Natoya Jourdain, Ratchaneewan Kumphakarm, Ming Zhou and Julio Pereira for obtaining a grant of £1500 from the Eastern ARC Events Fund to support the Statistical Ecology Research Festival (SERF).
SE@K awarded funding from NERC for an Advanced Training Short Course
Rachel McCrea, Eleni Matechou, Richard Griffiths and Diana Cole have been awarded funding of £28 796 from NERC for an Advanced Training Short Course on Statistical models for wildlife population assessment and conservation. The course will take place in January 2017.
Emily gave seminar to the Ecology group at the University of Sheffield
On 17th February Emily gave a seminar to the Ecology group at the University of Sheffield, which was “Recent developments for modelling butterfly abundance”.
Congratulations to Guru, Byron and Martin for best Paper in JABES by an IBS Member
Congratulations to Guru, Byron and Martin. Their paper “Two Stage Bayesian Study Design for Species Occupancy Estimation” (JABES 19:278-291) has been selected as the 2014 winner of the competition for “Best Paper in JABES by an IBS Member”.
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.