Talk 3

XI Workshop of Probability and Statistics group

CIDMA- University of Aveiro

Speaker: Tiago Marques - FCUL & University of St. Andrews

Title of the talk: Living on the edge: snapshots of a career listening at the interface between ecology and statistics

Abstract: The interface between statistics and ecology has been historically a fertile field for methods development and applications. I will present an overview of what I have been working on in the last few years, in general problems that require to model explicitly state processes, what the ecological reality might be, and observation processes, often just a set of nuisance parameters that avoid us being able to observe reality directly, and hence represent filters, which effects we must undo if reliable ecological inferences about the state processes are to be made. When thinking about estimating animal abundance, and in particular cetaceans, the last few years have seen a surge in the use of passive acoustic methods, where the sounds used by the animals are used to estimate their abundance. I will introduce what has been done in the topic and the key concepts involved and will the focus on some results from the ACCURATE project, a large-scale international project aiming at conducting research about cue production rates in cetaceans to inform passive acoustic density estimation exercises. This will be a lightweight talk but hopefully with something for everyone working in both areas, statistics and/or ecology, showcasing examples drawn from applications in multiple taxa, including at the very least - I predict with a strong prior but no promises - polar bears, birds and cetaceans.

Tiago Marques is Senior Research Fellow at University of St Andrews (UStA), works on ecological statistics, namely estimating animal abundance, focusing nowadays on passive acoustic density estimation. Invited lecturer in the Animal Biology Department in Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL), teaching statistics to biologists at the under and postgraduate level. Biology major (1998, DZA, FCUL), MSc in Probability and Statistics (2002, DEIO, FCUL) and PhD in Statistics (2007, UStA, UK). Currently on the executive board of the Portuguese Statistical Society (SPE) and former deputy-director for Centre for Statistics and Applications (CEAUL). External funding secured as PI or co-PI: +£130k and +$US 3.8M. Consultant on several international projects, including polar bears (Canada, Greenland, USA, Norway and Russia), whales (Greenland, Gulf of Mexico, Bahamas and Hawaii) and hares (Ireland), responsible for survey design, field work and data analysis. Instructor on 20+ international workshops on abundance estimation and 10+ R workshops. Work output includes 100+ peer-reviewed international papers (SCOPUS: +4200 citations, h-index 30), 4 book chapters, 1 book on distance sampling methods and 1 in preparation book on passive acoustic density estimation (both for Springer’s Series Methods in Statistical Ecology). 170+ congress contributions and 70+ invited talks, 20+ invited science outreach talks and 20+ guest lectures. Referee of 130+ papers for 65+ venues. Supervised/supervising 7/2 PhD and 17/3 MSc students. Participated in 30+ external committee memberships. Co-author of Distance for Windows, the industry standard software for distance sampling analysis.

CIÊNCIAVITAE ID: 161F-0DDB-81E2

ORCID: 0000-0002-2581-1972

SCOPUS Author ID: 6603703024

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