Hierarchical Modelling for the Environmental Sciences

Jim Clark is the Blomquist professor at Duke University, where his research focuses on how global change affects forests and grasslands. He received a B.S. from the North Carolina State University in Entomology (1979), a M.S. from the University of Massachusetts in Forestry and Wildlife (1984), and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Ecology (1988). At Duke University, Clark teaches Community Ecology and Ecological Models & Data. He has served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the University Program in Ecology and as Director of the Center on Global Change. Alan E. Gelfand is the J B Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University. An early contributor to the development of computational machinery for fitting hierarchical Bayesian models, his current research focuses on the analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal data. His primary areas of application are to problems in environmental science, ecology, and climatology. He received a B.S. from the City College of New York and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. After many years at the University of Connecticut, he joined the faculty at Duke University in August 2002.

Preface; PART I. INTRODUCTION TO HIERARCHICAL MODELING; 1. Elements of hierarchical Bayesian influence; 2. Bayesian hierarchical models in geographical genetics; PART II. HIERARCHICAL MODELS IN EXPERIMENTAL SETTINGS; 3. Synthesizing ecological experiments and observational data with hierarchical Bayes; 4. Effects of global change on inflorescence production: a Bayesian hierarchical analysis; PART III. SPATIAL MODELING; 5. Building statistical models to analyse species distributions; 6. Implications of vulnerability to hurricane damage for long-term survival of tropical tree species: a Bayesian hierarchical analysis; PART IV. SPATIO-TEMPORAL MODELING; 7. Spatial temporal statistical modeling and prediction of environmental processes; 8. Hierarchical Bayesian spatio-temporal models for population spread; 9. Spatial models for the distribution of extremes; References; Index