Applied Hierarchical Modeling in Ecology: Analysis of Distribution, Abundance and Species Richness in R and BUGS

Dr. Marc works as a senior scientist at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, Seerose 1, 6204 Sempach, Switzerland. This is a non-profit NGO with about 160 employees dedicated primarily to bird research, monitoring, and conservation. Marc was trained as a plant population ecologist at the Swiss Universities of Basel and Zuerich. After a 2-year postdoc at the (then) USGS Patuxent Wildlife Center in Laurel, MD. During the last 20 years he has worked at the interface between population ecology, biodiversity monitoring, wildlife management, and statistics. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and five textbooks on applied statistical modeling. He has also been very active in teaching fellow biologists and wildlife managers the concepts and tools of modern statistical analysis in their fields in workshops all over the world, something which goes together with his books, which target the same audiences. Dr Royle is a Senior Scientist and Research Statistician at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. His research is focused on the application of probability and statistics to ecological problems, especially those related to animal sampling and demographic modeling. Much of his research over the last 10 years has been devoted to the development of methods illustrated in our new book. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 journal articles, and co-authored the books Spatial Capture Recapture, Hierarchical Modeling and Inference in Ecology and Occupancy Estimation and Modeling: Inferring Patterns and Dynamics of Species Occurrence, all published by Academic Press.

• PART 1 MODELS FOR DYNAMIC SYSTEMS1. Relative Abundance Models for Population Dynamics2. Modeling Population Dynamics With Count Data3. Hierarchical Models of Survival4. Modeling Species Distribution and Range Dynamics, and Population Dynamics Using Dynamic Occupancy Models5. Modeling Metacommunity Dynamics Using Dynamic Community ModelsPART 2 ADVANCED MODELS6. Multi-state Occupancy Models7. Modeling False Positives8. Modeling Interactions Among Species9. Spatial Models of Distribution and Abundance10. Integrated Models for Multiple Types of Data11. Spatially Explicit Distance Sampling Along Transects12. Conclusions

"In terms of content, there is little more one could ask for. But even the detailed and careful analyses presented in each chapter cannot fully cover steps that would normally accompany statistical analyses: model diagnostics, quantification of uncertainty, particularly of model predictions, comparison with alternative model structures and so forth. The authors touch on these issues in the first volume, and are clearly aware of them, but it would be impossible and not really informative to add such common procedures to each and every single chapter. Overall this book is a must-have for any statistical ecologist who is working with data in the fields of conservation ecology or wildlife ecology, terrestrial or aquatic. It is not a book for casual reading, and experience with statistical analysis and R in particular are warranted." --Basic and Applied Ecology