Hierarchical Modelling of Complex Ecological Data

生态系统因不同层次的过程相互作用而变得复杂。生物和环境现象可能会影响整个社区、社区内的人口或人口中的个人，这些影响也可能随着时间的推移而变化。此外，在野外追踪个体的困难意味着，从这些系统收集的数据往往是通过反复观察被标记的个体来收集的。在传统的标记-再捕获实验中，从种群中捕获个体的动物被物理捕获，并在鸟类腿上标记或在鱼鳍上标记。最近，科学家们正在依靠自然方法来识别具有色素沉着模式的个体，这些模式可以从皮肤、头发或粪便中的DNA样本的照片或基因信息中识别出来。 我开发了分析生态数据的统计方法，帮助生态学家和野生动物管理者在个人、人口和社区层面上研究人类影响和其他因素对环境的影响。我特别感兴趣的是创建能够捕捉生态数据的多层次本质的分层模型，以及实施必要的复杂计算机算法，在未来五年内，我将在这一领域的三个主题上开展工作。首先，我将扩展现有的模型，以解决通过计算机匹配照片来识别个人时可能出现的错误，并开发新的计算方法，使这些模型适合大型数据集。其次，我将开发新的模型，使用被标记个人的数据来研究人群中的社会行为，并确定这种行为可能对个人行动和疾病传播产生的影响。最后，我将致力于新的方法，这些方法可以普遍应用于分析非常大的标记-重新捕获数据集。 我开发的工具将直接影响研究人员和野生动物管理人员研究野生动物种群的工作。它们将使这些研究人员能够回答有关这些种群动态以及在不同层面上影响生态系统的因素的新问题。反过来，这将有助于管理受到气候变化、栖息地丧失和其他人类影响的威胁的人口。

Ecological systems are complicated by the interplay of processes at distinct levels. Biological and environmental phenomena may affect entire communities, populations within a community, or individuals within a population, and these effects may also vary over time. Moreover, the difficulties in tracking individuals in the wild means that data from these systems are often collected by repeatedly observing marked individuals. In traditional mark-recapture experiments, animals individuals from the population are physically captured and marked with, for example, bands on a birds legs or tags in a fishes fin. More recently, scientists are relying on natural methods to identify individuals with pigmentation patterns that can be identified from photographs or genotype information available from DNA samples in skin, hair, or scat. I develop statistical methods for analysing ecological data that help ecologists and wildlife managers to study the effects of human impacts and other factors in the environment at the individual, population, and community levels. I am particularly interested in creating hierarchical models that capture the multi-level nature of ecological data and on implementing the complex computer algorithms that are necessary, and I will work on three themes within this area in the next five years. First, I will extend available models to account for possible errors when individuals are identified through computerized matching of photographs and develop new computing methods to fit these models to large data sets. Second, I will develop new models to study social behaviour within a population using data from marked individuals and to identify the impacts this behaviour might have on individual movements and the transmission of disease. Finally, I will work on new methods that can be applied generally to analyse very large mark-recapture data sets. The tools I develop will directly impact the work of researchers and wildlife managers studying populations of wild animals. They will allow these researchers to answer new questions about these populations dynamics and the factors that affect ecological systems at different levels. In turn, this will help to manage populations threatened by the effects of climate change, habitat loss, and other human impacts.