The next meeting of the Royal Statistical Society's Environmental
Statistics Study group will be on the topic of
Environmental sampling
and will be held on
November 26th, 2-4pm RSS Headquarters, Errol St., London
The programme is given below:
Design in environmental research - a neglected topic?
John Jeffers, University of Kent at Canterbury
Abstract
We live and work at a time when data collection and statistical
computations have become easy almost to the point of triviality.
Paradoxically, the design of data collection, never sufficiently
emphasised in the teaching of Statistics and Computing, have been
weakened by an apparent belief that extensive computation can make up
for any deficiencies in the design of data collection. Starting with
an emphasis on the importance of defining the population about which
we are seeking to make inferences, this paper reviews the requirements
of sampling and experimental design in environmental research. It
stresses that sufficient attention to the design of environmental
studies, with due regard to the difficulties of estimating population
parameters and the interaction between critical factors, before any
data are collected, is an essential pre-requisite for valid studies of
environmental issues.
Spatial sampling strategies for patch detection and surface
prediction
Jon Barry, University of Lancaster
Abstract
Patch detection is important in several areas- most notably in
pollution surveys of contaminated land, where the need is to find so
called 'hotspots' of pollutants, and in shellfish surveys where the
need is to find patches of shellfish above specified densities. Of
course, you want to be sure that if you don't find anything that you
haven't missed anything worth finding! Another important area is the
prediction of surfaces based on discrete sampling of the surface and
techniques such as kriging. I suggest the use of 'blob' designs (ones
with two densities of sampling) to try to provide good coverage of the
area as well as good estimation of the covariance function at short
distances.
All welcome
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