Technological advances are steadily enhancing our capacity to monitor the marine environment while international collaboration and online data sharing has made long time series of biological and environmental data increasingly accessible. This infrastructure can support research into marine ecosystem change, allowing us to understand and predict the impacts of external pressures and to develop appropriate management responses. To fully unlock that potential requires statistical methods that can effectively extract clear signals from what is complex and often noisy multivariate data and to describe relationships that may be non-linear and interactive.
This workshop is targeted at scientists working in the marine and related areas who are using long-term biological and environmental datasets to build understanding of ecosystem functioning and to apply that knowledge within a management context. The work shop will serve as a forum to discuss current statistical approaches to the analysis of such datasets and exchange ideas. The emphasis will be on detecting step changes and potential regime shifts. The format will be a combination of invited presentations, discussions and a hands-on data analysis session.
The workshop is hosted by the Marine and Freshwater Research Centre at GMIT as part of the EPA funded project: “Ecosystem tipping points: learning from the past to manage for the future” (2015-NC-MS-3). Additional support is provided by the Marine Institute under the Marine Research Programme with the support of the Irish Government.
For more information contact: roisin.nash[at]gmit.ie or deirdre.brophy[at]gmit.ie