Announce of Seminar

Dr. Luigi Spezia

Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland, Aberdeen, UK

MODELLING THE STATES OF SCOTLAND'S RIVERS

January 10th, 2012 at 14.00

Aula B, Santa Marta, Venezia

Anyone interested is invited to participate

Analyses of Scotland's rivers are presented both on a local and on a global scale, under the environmental and the ecological point of view. First, the multivariate time series of nitrogen concentrations are considered by modelling rivers in isolation, then modelling all data simultaneously. Next, the dynamics of the signatures of two stream isotopes is investigated. Finally, the mapping of the species distribution of freshwater pearl mussels in a river is shown. The analyses are performed by means of Bayesian hierarchical models, driven by a hidden Markov chain. The states of the Markov process allows gathering of the observations in a small set of homogeneous groups. The models shown belong to the class of hidden Markov models and Markov switching autoregressive models.

The talk is based on joint work with Christian Birkel (University of Aberdeen), Mark Brewer (Biomathematics& Statistics Scotland, Aberdeen), Susan Cooksley (The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen), Martyn Futter (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala), Roberta Paroli (Catholic University, Milan).

The announcement is available here.