Bayesian Population Analysis using WinBUGS: A Hierarchical Perspective

Bayesian statistics has exploded into biology and its sub-disciplines, such as ecology, over the past decade. The free software program WinBUGS, and its open-source sister OpenBugs, is currently the only flexible and general-purpose program available with which the average ecologist can conduct standard and non-standard Bayesian statistics.

• Comprehensive and richly commented examples illustrate a wide range of models that are most relevant to the research of a modern population ecologist
• All WinBUGS/OpenBUGS analyses are completely integrated in software R
• Includes complete documentation of all R and WinBUGS code required to conduct analyses and shows all the necessary steps from having the data in a text file out of Excel to interpreting and processing the output from WinBUGS in R

Dr. Marc Kéry is a senior scientist at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, a non-profit NGO with about 200 employees dedicated primarily to bird research, monitoring, and conservation. Marc was trained as a plant population ecologist at the universities of Basel and Zürich, Switzerland. After a 2-year postdoc at the (then) USGS Patuxent Wildlife Center in Laurel, USA, he moved into animal population ecology and during the last 25 years has worked at the interface between population ecology, biodiversity monitoring, wildlife management, and applied statistics. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and six textbooks on applied statistical modeling. He has taught more than 60 one-week workshops all over the world to biologists and wildlife managers about the concepts and practice of modern statistical analysis in their fields, something which goes together with his books, which target the same audiences.

Dr. Michael Schaub is a senior scientist and head of the population biology research group at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, and a courtesy professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Michael was trained as an animal population ecologist at the universities of Basel and Zürich. After a 1-year postdoc at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique (CNRS) in Montpellier, France, he jointed the Swiss Ornithological Institute. His research interests include population dynamics, capture-recapture models, integrated population models, and migratory birds. He has coauthored approximately 170 peer-reviewed journal publications and the two books on applied Bayesian modeling for ecologists and has taught about 30 week-long workshops all over the world.