May 31: Chris Daly - Guidelines for Assessing the Suitability of Spatial Climate Data Sets

The next speaker is Chris Daly, the renowned developer of the PRISM spatial climate modelling system. His work has earned him the 2004 Applied Meteorology Award from the American Meteorological Society.

We will discuss his 2006 paper: "Guidelines for assessing the suitability of spatial climate data sets", which can be found at the link below:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.1322/abstract

Feel free to post any questions or comments in advance of or during the discussion at UNSW at 2pm on Friday!

May 24: Shirley Pledger - Using Mixture Models to Model Abundance from Capture-Recapture Studies

Our next speaker is Shirley Pledger, an expert in capture-recapture analysis. She has suggested the following article explaining the use of mixture models to model abundance in the face of differing capture/re-capture probabilities:

http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bimj.200810446/abstract

Feel free to post any questions or comments in advance of the discussion group meeting at 2-3 on the 24th of May.

May 17: Gerry Quinn - Impact of Agriculture Land Use on Invertebrates in Intermittent Streams Using a Multivariate Approach

Our next speaker is Gerry Quinn, a marine ecologist who has contributed to many textbooks in wide use today. We’ll discuss a recent paper as a glimpse into how multivariate analysis is currently being applied to ecological problems, in particular on the impact of agricultural land use on invertebrates in intermittent streams. Here is a link to the article:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00027-012-0273-4

Hope to hear from you in the blogosphere in time for the meeting on Friday at 2.

Bill Shipley: trait-based community assembly and other cool T-shirts (May 10)

Next Symposium speaker is Bill Shipley on trait-based community assembly.  He has developed a fascinating approach to modelling the role that traits play in determining the relative abundance of different species in a community, based on maximum entropy.  He will be speaking at the Symposium in the same session as Trevor Hastie, given their respective insights into the MAXENT method.

We’ll read his landmark paper on the topic in the Science rag in 2006

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5800/812.short

(He has since written a whole book on the subject, complete with helpful T-shirt suggestion.)

If you are extra keen, a couple of technical comments on the paper have also been published, which might be helpful to get an alternate view on the topic – see links to related resources on the Science website.

Hope to hear from you on the blog next Friday 2-3 Sydney time...