Held in conjunction with the 2022 Annual Conference of the Wyoming chapter of the Wildlife Society
April 12, 2022
8 am - 5 pm (with release time for lunch from approx. 12 - 1pm)
Jackson, Wyoming
Cheyenne Room, Lodge at Jackson Hole Conference Center (same venue as rest of conference)
Hosted by the Wyoming chapter of The Wildlife Society
Supported by the Wyoming chapter of The Wildlife Society and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department
Introduce participants to Bayesian statistics, with the expectation that participants will become better-equipped consumers and producers of wildlife science based on Bayesian methods of data analysis.
Bayesian methods are increasingly used to analyze wildlife data. Although Bayesian methods have some advantages over the classical (frequentist) methods many scientists are familiar with, Bayesian approaches can be more difficult to implement and receive little coverage in traditional wildlife coursework and training. The aim of this workshop is to introduce participants to Bayesian statistics, with the expectation that participants will become better-equipped consumers and producers of scientific inference based on Bayesian methods of data analysis. First, we will briefly examine previously published Bayesian analyses to familiarize participants with how to interpret and critically evaluate science that uses Bayesian methods. Subsequently, the bulk of the workshop will focus on applied tutorials to teach the Bayesian method to fit simple and familiar statistical models. Discussions of the underlying philosophy, computational methods, and mathematical theory will be brief. Participants will use Bayesian methods to calculate basic summary statistics (mean, proportion), then advance to fitting regression models (linear regression, generalized linear models [GLM]), and conclude by fitting a Bayesian occupancy model. Hands-on exercises will be run in Program R using its interface to the Program JAGS. We expect that participants will leave with an increased fluency to evaluate research based on Bayesian statistics and with an increased capacity to learn and apply Bayesian methods in their own research. The target audience is college students and working professionals in the field of wildlife ecology and management. We expect participants to come with a working familiarity with basic statistical concepts, but little to no experience with Bayesian statistics. We will provide cursory introductions to the general concepts of regression and occupancy models, but participants will benefit most from this workshop if they already have a basic understanding of these models in a non-Bayesian context.