BioSS will be hosting an online talk by Professor Rachel McCrea (Lancaster University) to celebrate the 2nd International Day of Women in Statistics and Data Science (IDWSDS) on Tuesday the 10th of October 2023, 3-4 pm (UK time). 

Professor Rachel McCrea holds a Chair in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Lancaster University. She is the Director of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Much of Rachel’s research has been motivated by a desire to reliably inform conservation strategies, which often requires estimation of population sizes for difficult to count species.  In particular, she has developed a number of new statistical approaches for the modelling of capture-recapture data and has developed new methods for model selection and goodness-of-fit, work for which she was awarded the RSS Guy Medal in Bronze.

Her talk's title is "Statistical models for conservation translocations" and you can read a brief abstract below.

Conservation translocations are being increasingly used in the conservation of threatened species and as part of ecological restoration programmes. Robust estimates of abundance are essential for meaningful conservation decision-making and the impact of translocations on source populations needs to be understood.  Within this talk I will present a new capture-recapture model for translocated populations and will then present a modelling framework where capture-recapture is combined with removal/depletion methodology.  I will demonstrate that an exact likelihood is possible when individual level information is available, and I will show how a standard integrated population modelling approach, which assumes independence between component data sets, can be adapted to provide an approximate likelihood when individual level data is not available.  This approach, as well as providing a valuable tool for estimating the abundance of source populations post translocation, also motivates a new direction of research for overcoming issues of dependence of data within a standard integrated population modelling framework.

You can join this and a free, 24 hour schedule of wide-ranging talks by registering: https://www.idwsds.org/registration/

IDWSDS is an international initative led by the Caucus for Women in Statistics and Data Science (CWS), the Portuguese Statistical Society (SPE), and the American Statistical Association (ASA), with an organising committee comprising organisations worldwide including BioSS.