Ecological Statistics

Gordon Fox received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis. He is currently Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida. His research involves theoretical issues in ecology and population biology, and empirical studies of plant populations. He teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and supervises M.S. and Ph.D. students. He is co-author (with J. Gurevitch and S. M. Scheiner) of the textbook The Ecology of Plants, and co-editor (with C. K. Kelly and M. G. Bowler) of Temporal Niche Dynamics and Ecological Process. Fox is an associate editor of Ecology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).Simoneta Negrete-Yankelevich received her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, and was a postdoctoral fellow within the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Belowground Biodiversity project (GEF-UNEP-TSBF). She is currently a researcher in the Functional Ecology Network of the Instituto de Ecología A.C. in Mexico and a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers. She works on issues related to the temporal and spatial dimensions of disturbance in tropical agroecosystems. She coordinates and participates in research projects related to the long term effects of human disturbance on soil biota, fertility and functioning in the tropics. She teaches statistics courses for graduate students on linear models, spatial statistics, and multivariate statistics, and supervises M.S. and Ph.D. theses related to spatial issues in soil ecology.Vinicio J. Sosa received his Ph.D. from the University of Miami, and has an Applied Statistics Specialization from the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is a researcher in the Instituto de Ecología A.C. in Mexico and a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNI II). Sosa has extensive experience in applied ecological problems, especially on environmental impacts of infrastructure development. His current research focuses on the effect of landscape fragmentation on flying vertebrate communities, and on mutualistic relationships between columnar cacti and bats. He teaches graduate-level statistics courses for the Instituto de Ecología, A. C., and acts as consulting statistician within the Instituto. He is associate editor of Acta Zoologica Mexicana.

• Introduction ; 1. Approaches to Statistical Inference ; 2. Having the Right Stuff: the Effects of Data Constraints on Ecological Data Analysis ; 3. Likelihood and Model Selection ; 4. Missing Data: Mechanisms, Methods and Messages ; 5. What You Don't Know Can Hurt You: Censored and Truncated Data in Ecological Research ; 6. Generalized Linear Models ; 7. A Statistical Symphony: Instrumental Variables Reveal Causality and Control Measurement Error ; 8. Structural Equation Modeling: Building and Evaluating Causal Models ; 9. Research Synthesis Methods in Ecology ; 10. Spatial Variation and Linear Modeling of Ecological Data ; 11. Statistical Approaches to the Problem of Phylogenetically Correlated Data ; 12. Mixture Models for Overdispersed Data ; 13. Linear and Generalized Linear Mixed Models ; Appendix

In this well-written and well-edited book, the authors successfully convey an understanding of statistics, rather than just a menu of statistical procedures. Ideas are explained preferentially by examples and illustration, and mathematical formalism is held at a minimum ... This book is a source of coherent statistical understanding.