How To Be A Quantitative Ecologist

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How to be a Quantitative Ecologist

Author: Jason Matthiopoulos
language: en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date: 2011-04-12
Ecological research is becoming increasingly quantitative, yet students often opt out of courses in mathematics and statistics, unwittingly limiting their ability to carry out research in the future. This textbook provides a practical introduction to quantitative ecology for students and practitioners who have realised that they need this opportunity. The text is addressed to readers who haven't used mathematics since school, who were perhaps more confused than enlightened by their undergraduate lectures in statistics and who have never used a computer for much more than word processing and data entry. From this starting point, it slowly but surely instils an understanding of mathematics, statistics and programming, sufficient for initiating research in ecology. The book’s practical value is enhanced by extensive use of biological examples and the computer language R for graphics, programming and data analysis. Key Features: Provides a complete introduction to mathematics statistics and computing for ecologists. Presents a wealth of ecological examples demonstrating the applied relevance of abstract mathematical concepts, showing how a little technique can go a long way in answering interesting ecological questions. Covers elementary topics, including the rules of algebra, logarithms, geometry, calculus, descriptive statistics, probability, hypothesis testing and linear regression. Explores more advanced topics including fractals, non-linear dynamical systems, likelihood and Bayesian estimation, generalised linear, mixed and additive models, and multivariate statistics. R boxes provide step-by-step recipes for implementing the graphical and numerical techniques outlined in each section. How to be a Quantitative Ecologist provides a comprehensive introduction to mathematics, statistics and computing and is the ideal textbook for late undergraduate and postgraduate courses in environmental biology. "With a book like this, there is no excuse for people to be afraid of maths, and to be ignorant of what it can do." —Professor Tim Benton, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, UK
How to be a Quantitative Ecologist

Author: Jason Matthiopoulos
language: en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date: 2011-04-25
Ecological research is becoming increasingly quantitative, yet students often opt out of courses in mathematics and statistics, unwittingly limiting their ability to carry out research in the future. This textbook provides a practical introduction to quantitative ecology for students and practitioners who have realised that they need this opportunity. The text is addressed to readers who haven't used mathematics since school, who were perhaps more confused than enlightened by their undergraduate lectures in statistics and who have never used a computer for much more than word processing and data entry. From this starting point, it slowly but surely instils an understanding of mathematics, statistics and programming, sufficient for initiating research in ecology. The book’s practical value is enhanced by extensive use of biological examples and the computer language R for graphics, programming and data analysis. Key Features: Provides a complete introduction to mathematics statistics and computing for ecologists. Presents a wealth of ecological examples demonstrating the applied relevance of abstract mathematical concepts, showing how a little technique can go a long way in answering interesting ecological questions. Covers elementary topics, including the rules of algebra, logarithms, geometry, calculus, descriptive statistics, probability, hypothesis testing and linear regression. Explores more advanced topics including fractals, non-linear dynamical systems, likelihood and Bayesian estimation, generalised linear, mixed and additive models, and multivariate statistics. R boxes provide step-by-step recipes for implementing the graphical and numerical techniques outlined in each section. How to be a Quantitative Ecologist provides a comprehensive introduction to mathematics, statistics and computing and is the ideal textbook for late undergraduate and postgraduate courses in environmental biology. "With a book like this, there is no excuse for people to be afraid of maths, and to be ignorant of what it can do." —Professor Tim Benton, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, UK
Introduction to WinBUGS for Ecologists

Introduction to WinBUGS for Ecologists introduces applied Bayesian modeling to ecologists using the highly acclaimed, free WinBUGS software. It offers an understanding of statistical models as abstract representations of the various processes that give rise to a data set. Such an understanding is basic to the development of inference models tailored to specific sampling and ecological scenarios. The book begins by presenting the advantages of a Bayesian approach to statistics and introducing the WinBUGS software. It reviews the four most common statistical distributions: the normal, the uniform, the binomial, and the Poisson. It describes the two different kinds of analysis of variance (ANOVA): one-way and two- or multiway. It looks at the general linear model, or ANCOVA, in R and WinBUGS. It introduces generalized linear model (GLM), i.e., the extension of the normal linear model to allow error distributions other than the normal. The GLM is then extended contain additional sources of random variation to become a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) for a Poisson example and for a binomial example. The final two chapters showcase two fairly novel and nonstandard versions of a GLMM. The first is the site-occupancy model for species distributions; the second is the binomial (or N-) mixture model for estimation and modeling of abundance. - Introduction to the essential theories of key models used by ecologists - Complete juxtaposition of classical analyses in R and Bayesian analysis of the same models in WinBUGS - Provides every detail of R and WinBUGS code required to conduct all analyses - Companion Web Appendix that contains all code contained in the book and additional material (including more code and solutions to exercises)