Applied Hierarchical Modeling in Ecology: Distribution, Abundance, Species Richness offers a new synthesis of the state-of-the-art of hierarchical models for plant and animal distribution, abundance, and community characteristics such as species richness using data collected in metapopulation designs. These types of data are extremely widespread in ecology and its applications in such areas as biodiversity monitoring and fisheries and wildlife management.
This first volume explains static models/procedures in the context of hierarchical models that collectively represent a unified approach to ecological research, taking the reader from design, through data collection, and into analyses using a very powerful class of models. Applied Hierarchical Modeling in Ecology, Volume 1 serves as an indispensable manual for practicing field biologists, and as a graduate-level text for students in ecology, conservation biology, fisheries/wildlife management, and related fields.
- Provides a synthesis of important classes of models about distribution, abundance, and species richness while accommodating imperfect detection
- Presents models and methods for identifying unmarked individuals and species
- Written in a step-by-step approach accessible to non-statisticians and provides fully worked examples that serve as a template for readers' analyses
- Includes companion website containing data sets, code, solutions to exercises, and further information
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.
