American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) Last Modified: 98-Jul-01

This month's news column reports on two recent conferences related to themission of the ENVR section.

The conference, "Environmental Monitoring Surveys over Time", was heldApril 20-22, 1998, on the University of Washington campus in Seattle,Washington. The conference was organized and partially supported by theNational Research Center for Statistics and the Environment (NRCSE, itselffunded by the US Environmental Protection Agency) located at the UW;additional funding was provided by the Natural Resources Inventory andAnalysis Institute of the US Dept. of Agriculture's (USDA) NaturalResources Conservation Service, and the Inventory and Monitoring Instituteof the USDA Forest Service. The conference summarized thestate-of-science regarding surveys over time for natural resources and wasorganized around design and analysis issues, social science issuespertinent to natural resources, surveys in different natural resourceareas, proposed modifications for current surveys, and approaches forfuture surveys. Sessions addressed terrestrial surveys, human populationand institutional surveys, aquatic and avian surveys, remote sensing,watershed surveys, integrating different surveys, nonsampling errors,database construction and dissemination, and statistical estimationissues. The sessions were lively, with discussions frequently running intothe break times. The program committee included Tony Olsen (US EPA),Sarah Nusser (Iowa State University), Ray Czaplewski (USDA Forest ServiceRocky Mountain Research Station), and Loveday Conquest (University ofWashington and NRCSE). Plans for a journal volume featuring several ofthe papers are in the works.

The abstracts from conference presentations may be viewed through theNRCSE website (www.stat.washington.edu/NRCSE/). In the weeks followingthe conference,the computer-generated transparencies from the speaker presentations arebeing added to the NRCSE website.

The Third International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in NaturalResources and Environmental Sciences was held May 20-22, 1998 at the LoewsLe Concorde Hotel in Quebec City, Canada. This symposium series started in1994 in Williamsburg, Virginia with the second symposium having been heldin 1996 in Fort Collins, Colorado. The goals of the symposium haveremained the same over its lifespan: to provide a forum of exchange forindividuals interested in any aspect of spatial data quality as related tonatural resources.

This third symposium attracted approximately 100 individuals from all overthe world. Moreover, the scientific background of those attending wasfairly broad. Individuals from disciplines such as Statistics and ComputerScience could be found at coffee breaks talking with professionalsconcerned with Wildlife Biology and Soil Science, who in turn were seendiscussing various issues with attendees rooted in Geography and Geomatics.

The session themes also reflected the diversity of interests of thoseassembled. Some examples are:

Before breaking into concurrent sessions covering these themes, each daystarted with a keynote speaker who had been carefully chosen to covervarious aspects of uncertainty. Todd Mowrer (U.S. Forest Service)discussed the importance of raising awareness about uncertainty; DanielGriffith (Dept. of Geography, Syracuse University) covered the consequencesof the propagation of errors from one data source to another; Nick Chrisman(Dept. of Geography, University of Washington) addressed the issue ofdeveloping appropriate tools for managing spatial uncertainty.

It is clear that the subject of spatial uncertainty has grown in importancein the natural resource field in recent years. The symposium demonstratedthe breadth of associated problems, and the wide diversity of approachesbeing adopted to address those problems. It was encouraging to see thelevel of dedication of professionals from a wide variety of disciplines tobring problems of spatial uncertainty under control.

The Proceedings of the symposium is being published in book form by AnnArbor Press and is due to be available by the end of 1998. It will bedistributed free of charge to all conference attendees and may be purchaseddirectly from Ann Arbor Press at a cost of approximately $60 U.S. (AnnArbor Press, Inc., 121 South Main Street, P.O. Box 310, Chelsea, Michigan48118 USA (313) 475-8787, FAX: (313)475-8852).

The 4th Symposium will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in the year2000 and will be organized by Gerard Heuvelink of the Faculty ofEnvironmental Sciences, University of Amsterdam (G.B.M.Heuvelink@frw.uva.nl)