American Statistical Association (ASA)
Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR)

The ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) is interested in a broad range of statistical issues and activities linked by a common focus on the development and application of statistical methods to environmental research and policy.

Announcements

The ENVR Newsletter 2008 is now available here.

 

TIES 2008, 19th Annual Conference of The International Environmetrics Society
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, June 8-13, 2008.

Papers are invited within the general theme, Quantitative Methods for Environmental Sustainability. Deadline for abstract submission and early bird registration is April 18.

Invited sessions to date: Fire spread modelling; Pollution source apportionment; Modelling mountain pine beetle spread; Marine ecology; Spatio-temporal models for air quality and epidemiology; Spatial-temporal analysis of environmental health data; Monitoring, modelling and managing environmental systems; Ecological Sampling; Communicating risk and uncertainty; Landscape level risk; Spatial modelling; Change-point methods for environmental series; Changes in environmental data; Applications of computer models; Modelling of covariates in environmental studies; Ecological modelling; Fisheries monitoring issues; Sustainability and point processes; Recent developments in forest sampling.

President’s Invited Lecture, The role of statisticians in international science policy, Peter Guttorp, and J. Stuart Hunter Lecture, Change point analysis of extreme values, Jef Teugels.

A one-day course on Modelling Environmental Extremes will be given Sunday June 8. There is a Best Student Paper Competition and Best Poster Award.

Conference Co-Chairs: David Brillinger University of California Berkeley and Sylvia Esterby, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Contact and information: TIES2008@ubc.ca. and http://people.ok.ubc.ca/zhrdlick/ties08/intro.htm

 

Summer Workshop: Spatial Filtering with the Eigenvector Approach
The University of Texas at Dallas, June 16-20, 2008.

Application and Information: www.spatialfiltering.com

Application deadline: May 5, 2008

Participant's support: up to $750 for 25 successful applicants

Workshop Coordinators: Daniel A. Griffith and Michael Tiefelsdorf

Synopsis:Spatial filtering is a novel spatial statistical methodology to capture the inherent autocorrelation within geo-referenced observations. This weeklong workshop introduces a group of young scholars and established professionals to the underlying concept of spatial filtering, its broad spectrum of applications and different model specifications. In essence, spatial filtering uses a set of spatial proxy variables, which usually are extracted as eigenvectors from an underlying spatial relationship matrix that ties the spatial objects together, and implants these vectors as control variables into a model. These control variables identify and isolate the stochastic spatial dependencies among observations, thus allowing model building to proceed as if the observations were independent. This permits applying standard linear and generalized linear models to spatially distributed data, to compare competing specifications of underlying relationship structures among spatial objects, to model local and global spatial heterogeneities, to capture network autocorrelation in spatial interaction flows, and to simplify autoregressive Bayesian model specifications.

 

Upcoming ENVR Workshop
What: Statistical Issues in Monitoring the Environment
When: Oct. 22-24, 2008
Where: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado

This workshop covers state-of-the-art applications and statistical methods in environmental monitoring. Sessions on applications include monitoring in ecology, monitoring in air quality, monitoring of aquatic resources, monitoring of climate change and its impacts. The spatio-temporal data collected in environmental monitoring present some interesting and challenging statistical problems such as modeling of space-time correlation, analysis of the huge amount of correlated data, and analysis of high frequency monitoring data. Technical sessions will cover recent developments in statistical methods for environmental data.  A one-day short course on the analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal data will be offered and taught by Doug Nychka. There will also be a poster session and the poster abstracts need to be submitted by September 23, 2008. For more information, visit http://www.stat.purdue.edu/envr/ or contact Hao Zhang, Department of Statistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906:(765)496-9548; zhanghao@purdue.edu.

Posting announcements on ENVR website