Eleanor D’Arcy, Environment Agency
Dr Eleanor D’Arcy is a senior statistical advisor at the Environment Agency, working on the Defra funded Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme. This is a science innovation and transformation programme set up to collect data on the extent, condition and change over time of England’s land and water environments, as part of the UK government’s commitment to leave the environment in a better state for future generations. Eleanor’s research interests include environmental and ecological statistics topics: sampling design, data integration and extreme value statistics. She completed her PhD at Lancaster University on ‘Extreme value methods for protecting and maintaining critical infrastructure from natural hazards’ which was in collaboration with EDF Energy. In 2023/24 she was a William Guy lecturer for the Royal Statistical Society and she will be vice-chair of the Young Statisticians Section throughout 2025.
scott hosking, Alan Turing Institute and British Antartic Survey
Dr Scott Hosking is the Mission Director for Environmental Forecasting at the Alan Turing Institute, and the Head of the AI Lab at the British Antarctic Survey. His interests include fusion of multi-modal observational data, data-driven environmental forecasting, and developing the underpinning capabilities and digital infrastructure required for environmental digital twins.
More information is available here: https://scotthosking.com/
Jafet Belmont Osuna, University of Glasgow
Dr Jafet Belmont Osuna received a BSc in Biology from the School of Sciences, UNAM, México, in 2014 and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Glasgow in 2021. His research focuses on developing statistical models to analyse biodiversity data from citizen science projects and applying Bayesian methods to characterise biological communities in changing environments. He is also interested in developing and exploring machine-learning techniques to analyse complex ecological and environmental data. Dr Belmont Osuna is currently investigating methods to estimate species distributions while accounting for the observational process of how data is collected across different citizen science biodiversity monitoring schemes in the UK. He is also interested in developing model validation and diagnostic tools for some commonly used ecological models. He is part of a multidisciplinary team aiming to develop a generalised modelling framework for integrated species distribution models using INLA (integrated nested Laplace approximation) providing a single practical tool for statisticians and ecologists alike.
Dr Alison Johnston, director of creem (university of St Andrews)
Alison Johnston is an ecological statistician and co-director of the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Statistics (CREEM) at the University of St Andrews. She is interested in how we collect and analyse ecological data to learn about the natural world, developing and applying analytical methods to extract reliable information about biodiversity. With particular interests in analytical approaches for complex and large datasets, she was worked extensively with citizen science data
Environmental and Ecological Statistics Conference 