What's new?
- April: MOCHA project has started!
- Nov: All of the data generated from our DECAF project (estimating whale population density from their calls) is now available from the OBIS-SEAMAP geographic database repository. Just search in the Quick Link box for DECAF.
- Papers recently accepted/published/uploaded: (for full text follow the link)
- May: Jewell et al. (2012, Marine Ecology Progress Series) giving some inferences from putting lots of cetacean line transect data together.
- April: Martin et al. (In press, Marine Mammal Science) showing estimation of minke whale density in Hawaii using their "boing" calls and an approach called spatially-explicit capture recapture.
- March: McClintock et al. (In press, Ecological Monographs) giving new general methods for fitting models of animal movement to telemetry data.
- March: Potts et al. (In press, Methods in Ecology and Evolution) demonstrating a new way (trapping point transects) to efficiently estimate density of cryptic species like small mammals.
- March: Ward et al. (In press, Marine Mammal Science) showing estimation of sperm whale density in the Bahamas using a very dense array of acoustic sensors and some clever acoustic processing.
- Jan: Borkin et al. (2012, European Journal of Entomology) demonstrating line transect methods on wood ant nests.
- Jan: Kyhn et al. (2012, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) demonstrating how you can get harbour porpoise density out of click detectors called T-PODs (with additional shore-based observers).
About me
I am a statistical ecologist based in the
Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (CREEM)
at the University of St Andrews. CREEM is nominally divided up into
research units, and some of my work is within the
Research Unit for Wildlife Population Assessment (RUWPA).
I am also part of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE) and
Scottish Oceans Institute (SOI).
There are two main strands to my work:
- Use of computer intensive methods to fit and compare stochastic models
of wildlife population dynamics. I mostly work on algorithms called particle filters.
Here is an accessible article about some of this work.
- Development of methods and software for estimating the size, density and distribution
of wild animal and plant populations. I mostly work on a group of related methods
called distance sampling.
Here is a poster giving an accessible overview of some of this work.
Here is an introductory article on distance sampling.
For more on these topics, see "Links related to current projects", below.
Further information
- Publications and (p)reprints
- Talks and posters
- Software to download
- Teaching
- MT3607: Computing in Statistics. Co-taught with Eric Rexstad. Class running this semester (Spring 2012).
- MT5753: Statistical Modelling. Co-taught with Monique MacKenzie and Paul Wilson. Next class running (Winter 2012).
- International training workshops in distance sampling and wildlife abundance estimation.
- PhD students I (co-)supervise
- Danielle Harris (Statistics and Biology). Estimating the abundance of whales using information from sparse arrays of seabed-mounted hydrophones.
- Theoni Photopoulos (Biology and Statistics). Inferences about pinniped foraging ecology and habitat preferences from telemetry data.
- James Lawrence (Statistical Laboratory, Univ. Cambridge). Trans-dimensional sequential importance sampling for model averaging, with application to Bayesian state-space models of wildlife population dynamics.
- Marjolaine Caillet (Biology and Statistics). Use of Passive Acoustic Monitoring for risk mitigation, assessment and monitoring of cetacean populations.
- Chris Sutherland (Biology, Univ. Aberdeen). Dynamics of fragmented populations.
- Hanna Nuuttila (School of Ocean Sciences, Univ. Wales, Bangor). Acoustic monitoring of bottlenose dolphins and harbour porpoises.
- Departmental responsibilities
- Honours adviser.
- Other stuff: environment officer; stats rep on the equipment committee; academic rep for school on research staff forum
- Links related to some current projects
- Past research
- PhD research: Evaluation of statistical methods for estimating long-term population change from extensive wildlife surveys
- Use of statistical power analysis in ecology
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![[Picture of Len Thomas]](images/arusha1.jpg)