Workshop at Dalhousie on Statistical Methods for Marine Ecological Data

Last summer, Joanna Flemming, Ram Myers and Chris Field decided to plan a Workshop that would facilitate discussion of appropriate statistical methodologies for carrying out inference for typical fisheries/ecological series which vary over both time, space and often species. Joanna and Chris felt it was especially important to go ahead with the Workshop since the questions Ram raised are still very much with us.

The Workshop took place on June 7th and 8th at Dalhousie in Chase 319. We had three Statisticians from out of town who participated: Eva Cantoni (University of Geneva), Rick Routledge (Simon Fraser University) and Alan Welsh (Australian National University). There were no formal presentations, but rather we had several Biologists present the type of data they are working with and outline the questions they would like to answer based on the data. Coilin Minto, Francesco Ferretti and Heike Lotze presented their data (see short descriptions), and also Joanna presented some data that she is working on which comes from Julia Baum and Ram. We then had open discussion on the appropriate statistical models for the data and the type of inference to be used. To keep in contact, an email list was created of the workshop participants that wished to included.

At lunchtime on Friday, there was a special seminar by Jeffrey Rosenthal of the University of Toronto. He is author of the popular book, "Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probability" and is our Department's distinguished lecturer for this year. He gave a lecture for the general public on Friday evening at 7:30pm, but he agreed to also give a more specialist lecture from 12:30 to 1:30 in Chase 319. His seminar title is "Adaptive MCMC: Challenges and Opportunities". See the Abstract.