Zero inflation in ecology

The April Eco-Stats Lab (Friday 24th, 2pm, Bioscience level 6) will be on zero inflated data in ecology. 

It's very common for ecological data to contain many zeros. To account for this we may need to:

1. Use zero inflated regression models

2. Do absolutely nothing (i.e. fit standard glm's)

In this lab we'll talk about why many zeros may occur in ecology, and the appropriate ways to account for them in your analysis.We will mostly use the pscl package in R.

Special Issue from Eco-Stats Symposium in MEE April 2015 issue

The Eco-Stats Symposium led to a series of papers which make up the April Special Issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution.  Read the blog post on the topic for a little more info.  This includes contributions to species distribution modelling (point process models, measurement error, jointly estimating observer bias across multiple spp), multivariate analysis (a method for unconstrained ordination, trait analysis), diversity estimation (rarefaction for phylogenetic diversity, how to weight branches in functional diversity computation).

Planning is well underway for a follow-up Eco-Stats Conference in December 2015 at UNSW, featuring Otso Ovaskainen (Helsinki), Doug Wu (East Anglia), Jay ver Hoef (Alaska), Melodie McGeoch (Monash) and plenty more.  We'll send out a call for registrations and poster abstracts in the next month or so.