Spatial: Statistical Aspects of Environmental Risk - April 7-9, 2010

General Information

The Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) announces a workshop on Statistical Aspects of Environmental Risk, jointly organized with the SPRUCE initiative, to take place at the Radisson Hotel in Research Triangle Park, NC from April 7-9,2010.

There will be five sessions on the following topics.

April 7, morning: Wildfires and Extreme Events. Much recent research in climatology has focused on the broad question of whether extreme meteorological events are becoming more extreme as a result of greenhouse-gas-induced global warming. This session will explore one particular aspect of extreme events: statistical modeling of wildfires.

April 7, afternoon: Ecological Modeling. This session will be concerned with some general statistical issues in modeling ecosystems, whether marine, freshwater or terrestrial. Often complex inter-relationships exist, while the observational records are limited (in either space or time). This session, through a series of case studies, will explore the power of a variety of different statistical approaches, and the challenges presented, including spatio-temporal aspects.

April 8, morning: Preferential Sampling and Point Process Models. A recurring problem in many environmental monitoring contexts is to reconstruct a spatial field from a limited number of monitors. Conventional kriging approaches effectively assume that the placement of the monitors is random, and may not be valid if, for instance, an environmental monitoring agency places the monitors in "hotspots" where the pollution is already known to be high. Recently some new statistical approaches have been proposed to spatial prediction in this context. This session is devoted to these developments.

April 8, afternoon: Computation and Visualization in Space-Time Statistics. The increasing availability of high-dimensional, high-resolution systems for environmental monitoring has created new needs for statistical computation and graphics with very large spatial and space-time datasets. This session will explore new developments in computation for such datasets.

April 9, morning: Health Effects of Climate Change and Air Pollution. There is by now an extensive literature on the human health consequences of air pollution, and a less extensive but still substantial parallel literature on health effects of climate change. Recently, attention has focused on the combined effects of both types of stress, for example, trying to quantify the extent to which warmer temperatures will lead to more ground-level ozone which will in turn have adverse consequences for human health. This session will highlight recent research on these topics.

Each session will feature talks by invited international experts, as well as presentations from local working groups. There will, in addition, be a poster session and reception on the evening of April 7, to which all are invited to contribute.

Organizers:
Richard Smith, University of North Carolina (chair of organizing committee)
Montse Fuentes, North Carolina State University
Sudipto Banerjee, University of Minnesota
Scott Holan, University of Missouri
Marian Scott, Glasgow University, U.K.
Feridun Turkman, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Clive Anderson, Sheffield University, U.K.

The SPRUCE initiative is concerned with Statistics in Public Resources, Utilities and Care of the Environment. It was established in 1990 and is active and influential in advancing use of statistical models and methods particularly in respect of major environmental issues, including global warming and the greenhouse effect; acid rain; disposal of nuclear waste products; air soil and water pollution; nitrate leaching; threats to flora and fauna etc. SPRUCE encourages statisticians and others to work together to resolve the environmental problems through such approaches as conservation, remediation, management of resources, monitoring of ecosystems, pollution assessment and control, and so on. SPRUCE encourages and supports research and development work. It has organized major International Conferences and Workshops. The materials from the conferences have been published in 5 research level books. SPRUCE offers modest research bursaries to young researchers to attend these workshops and other events SPRUCE is registered with the UK Charity Commission as the SPRUCE TRUST, under the chairmanship of Professor Vic Barnett (vic.barnett@ntu.ac.uk).

Schedule

Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Radisson RTP

Thursday, April 8, 2010
Radisson RTP