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Activity Number: 288 - The New Era of Ecological Statistics
Type: Invited
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
Abstract #313590
Title: Bridging the Gaps Between Mechanistic and Phenomenological Modeling for Ecological Applications
Author(s): Leah R Johnson*
Companies: Virginia Polytechnic and State University
Keywords: ecology; Bayesian statistics; mathematical models
Abstract:

There are a variety of approaches to modeling and making predictions about the dynamics of ecological systems. For instance, one can take a strategic/mechanistic approach that primarily concerns itself with determining what types of processes can cause observed patterns. However, strategic models often require large amounts of data to parameterize them and make them useful for prediction. On the other extreme are tactical/phenomenological models, like regressions, that usually focus on fitting a pattern without elucidating why those patterns exist. Tactical models, while often conceptually simpler, can be poor for extrapolating beyond the range of the data. Thus each approach has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of data needed to parameterize and validate the model and the types of predictions that we can make using them. In this talk I will discuss different approaches for building models for ecological processes that incorporate data at different scales. To bridge these scales we need biologists, mathematicians, and statisticians to work together to incorporate the right level of detail for a chosen problem to make better predictions and forecasts of these systems.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

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