description

The Environmental and Ecological Statistics Conference is a satellite conference to the ISI World Statistics Congress 2025 and is sponsored by TIES and the Environmental Statistics Section of the Royal Statistical Society.

Building on the success of the Environmental and Ecological Statistics workshops organised at Lancaster University in 2023 and 2024, the main aim of this event is to strengthen synergies between environmental and ecological statistics, support knowledge exchange and dissemination, and create a platform for collaboration between scientists, data scientists and applied statisticians, particularly those in academic and NGO organisations, who are often isolated members of cross-disciplinary R&D teams.

aims

• Continue to strengthen synergies between Statistical modelling of environmental processes and ecological systems and to support the exchange of knowledge between them. 
• Dissemination, and raising awareness, of state-of-the-art statistical methodologies and, conversely, allowing scientists and other end-users the opportunity to shape and lead data-science-related discussions.  
• Building a platform for collaboration between scientists, data scientists and applied statisticians, particularly those in academic and NGO organisations, who are often isolated members of cross-disciplinary R&D teams.

dr daniela castro-camilo (University of glasgow)

Dr Castro-Camilo is Senior Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Glasgow. Her research revolves around environmental disaster-related statistics, creating methods and novel applications to learn about and predict disaster occurrences and their impacts. This is done through a combination of the theory and applications of multivariate and spatial extremes, spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, environmental statistics, causal inference and Bayesian inference.

Over the last few years, she has developed user-friendly methods that promote the need to adequately capture extreme observations within the usual statistical analysis centred around mean values. Most of her methods are available through the R-INLA package or GitHub.

She actively contributes to the statistical community, serving as the meeting secretary for the Environmental Section of the Royal Statistical Society, as an associated editor for the journal Environmetrics, as a member of the International Environmetrics Society outreach and liaison committee and as an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

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dr carolina euan (lancaster university)

Dr Carolina Euan is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University. Her primary research interest is developing statistical methodologies to better understand environmental data, which involves using time series, spatiotemporal statistics, and clustering methods.

Currently, she is collaborating closely with the EDF R&D team to study sea surface temperature patterns around the UK. Carolina also has expertise in statistical modelling of brain connectivity to understand the impact of conditions like epilepsy on the brain.

She is also very interested in engaging with research-linked organisations or societies. Carolina is a member of the EPSRC Mathematical Sciences Early Career Forum and a TIES Board Member.

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dr emma eastoe (lancaster university)

Dr Emma Eastoe is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Statistics Section in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University. Her main research interests are in environmental statistics and extreme value analysis – two topics which fortunately are quite easily combined. She has had the privilege of working on some really interesting problems, with some excellent scientists and PhD students.

Recent projects include the extremes of space weather events, ice melt on the Greenland glacier, flooding of all kinds, and air pollution. She is currently interested in risk prediction in a changing world and modelling extremes on river networks.

She leads the Environmental and Ecological Statistics Research group at Lancaster, which brings together colleagues from the School of Mathematical Sciences, Lancaster Environment Centre and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

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professor claire millier (university of glasgow)

Professor Claire Miller is Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Glasgow. Her research interests include developing spatiotemporal statistical and data analytics methodology to address questions motivated by environmental applications.

Projects include investigating monitoring network design and the integration and fusion of data from different sources including from in-situ manual monitoring, automatic monitoring and satellite data, for assessing water catchments.

She is President of The International Environmetrics Society, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, an associate editor for Environmetrics and Journal of Applied Statistics: Environmental Statistics and Data Science and member of the Royal Statistical Society Environmental Statistics section and climate change task force.

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professor rachel mccrea (Lancaster University)

Professor Rachel McCrea holds a Chair in Statistics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University. Prior to this appointment, she was the Head of Statistics at the University of Kent. Much of Rachel’s research has been motivated by a desire to reliably inform conservation strategies and she has developed new modelling approaches and methods to overcome data driven challenges. She is Deputy Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistics and Operational Research in partnership with Industry at Lancaster University. Rachel is the Director of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology, a leading cross-institutional Centre in the UK bringing together statisticians and quantitative ecologists. The quality of Rachel’s research has been recognised by a Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze in 2020 and she was appointed as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2021.

Rachel’s current research interest include development of new statistical models for removal and conservation translocation data and also quantifying illegal trade from seizure data.

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dr Marta Shocket(Lancaster University)

Marta Shocket is a lecturer in ecology at Lancaster University whose research investigates how temperature, food resources, and other environmental factors impact transmission of infectious diseases. Their research combines empirical data collection and mathematical modelling, with a particular focus on: 1) fitting functional responses to trait data in order to parameterise population-level models and 2) validating the output of these models with data from the field. Most of their recent work has focused on mosquito-borne pathogens, but they are currently developing research projects working on sandfly transmitted pathogens and fungal parasites that infect insect hosts. They earned their PhD at Indiana University (USA) investigating a Daphnia freshwater zooplankton-fungus host-parasite model system, before completing postdocs at Stanford and UCLA (USA).

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Dr Ruth O’Donnell (University of Glasgow)

Ruth O’Donnell is a lecturer in statistics and data analytics within the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow. Her research is focused on the development of nonparametric regression modelling and functional data analysis to address questions about environmental conditions. Recently, she has worked on data fusion approaches for multiple monitoring systems and unsupervised classification of remote sensing data in order to identify coherence in water reflectance. Her current interests lie in developing modelling approaches to maximize the use of national-scale river network monitoring data, providing a foundation for evidence-based policies in river quality assessment.