American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) Last Modified: 1999-Jun-20 Send comments, corrections, additions to: ENVR Web Editor or ENVR Webmaster

As Distinguished Lukacs Professor for the Academic Year 1998-1999 in the Departmentof Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University (Ohio), Dr. G. P. Patilconvened the 1999 Lukacs Symposium for the weekend of April 23-25. The conferencetheme was "Frontiers of Environmental and Ecological Statistics for the 21st Century:Synergistic Challenges, Opportunities and Directions for Statistics, Ecology, Environment and Society." Approximately 120 registrants from around the U.S., Canada,and overseas made their way, despite midwestern spring weather that brought Chicago'sO'Hare airport to a near standstill, to the small town of Bowling Green a few miles southof Toledo. There we were amply rewarded by a stimulating and thoroughly inter-disciplinary program put together by Dr. Patil and his assistants from the Bowling Green faculty.

Sessions in statistical ecology, environmental statistics, geospatial statistics and riskassessment were tied together by several plenary panel discussions emphasizing thesymposium's motto: seeking a productive COMbination of Practicality And ScholarShip(COMPASS). In the first of these sessions, Dr. Patil unveiled his proposal for aHandbook for Applied Environmental and Ecological Statistics. The goal of thishandbook would be to provide its readers (envisioned as field practitioners in the areas ofenvironmental survey and remediation rather than professional statisticians) with aframework for thinking in statistical terms about problems from sample design to cancerclusters to global warming. Articles would be 10-20 pages in length, with pre-negotiatedcontent and structure. Interested potential authors are invited to contact Professor Patil(gpp@stat.psu.edu).

Other introductory reviews were presented by William Hunt on national air quality andemission trends, Robert Gibbons on environmental regulatory statistics, and MitchellSmall on statistical tools for stakeholder participation. Plenary sessions near the end ofthe symposium featured short presentations by a cross-section of noteworthy environmental and ecological statisticians as well as some non-statisticians, from a greatvariety of institutions-academic, government and private. These sessions generated livelyfloor discussions on topics such as the role of computers in statistics and statisticaleducation for non-statistical investigators in the fields of ecology and other environmental sciences. As Brian Dennis (U. Idaho) observed, traditional statisticalecology courses fail to "reveal the secret world of statistics", and his call for morebiology-friendly texts and programs was echoed in various forms by many other speakers.

The invited and contributed papers provided evidence of the cross-fertilization that isalready occurring between ecological and environmental statistics and the entire spectrumof physical and biological sciences. The speakers included statisticians who are not partof statistics departments or groups, many scientists who were not formally trained asstatisticians, as well as statisticians in traditional positions. The talks reflected thisdiversity of backgrounds. For example, a talk by Dale Zimmerman (U. Iowa) on analyzing spatial point processes with reversible jump MCMC was followed by Bai-LianLi's (U. New Mexico) talk on the use of equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamicmodels to characterize biodiversity. I was only sorry that I was unable to attend more ofthe talks, even though conference was considerably smaller than the Joint Statistical Meetings.

Arrangements have been made for papers from the conference to be submitted to one offour peer-reviewed journals. The symposium was co-sponsored by the ENVR section ofthe ASA, so papers may also be submitted to the ENVR Proceedings. To submit yourmanuscript to the ENVR proceedings, send a copy to Dr. Philip Dixon, ENVR Publication Chair, 125 Snedecor Hall, Iowa State University, Ames IA 50011-1210 before 1 Oct 1999.