Since a few years, various subsamples of Jörn Pagel, Joseph Chipperfield, Björn Reineking and I have been teaching an introductory summer school in Bayesian statistics. In previous years, we were in Bayreuth 2011 Bayreuth 2012, Göttingen 2013 and Freiburg 2013. This year, we will be in a beautiful field station close to Bergen, Norway. The…
It seems that the final publication of our special issue on species distribution models and the niche is drawing nearer, and to bridge the time for the (admittedly, probably sizable) group of those are checking their RSS feeds daily in expectation of this event, I would like to highlight three other papers of this special…
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. (From “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933.) I…
Two papers that just appeared in press at Ecography caught my attention, a review about methods to deal with collinearity lead by Carsten Dormann (looks like the sequel to his autocorrelation paper in the same journal), and a “horizon scan” for macroecology by Jan Beck and colleagues. I guess the issue of collinearity is pretty…
I have been musing about the use of the wording “error” in statistical analysis – it is common to speak about “observation error” or “process error”, but what we really mean are unobserved ecological or physical processes that affect our system or our observations, and that we choose to subsume in a probabilistic model. One…
In a new study led by Carsten Dormann and Stanislaus Schymanski which I coauthored, we look at differences, but also at growing similarities between rather static/statistical/correlative and rather dynamic/process-based approaches to species distribution modeling. I think this is an interesting paper which touches upon a lot of issues that arise from the fact that classical…
theoretical ecology 