Trend Analysis and Environmental Impact Assessment
- Start Date: February 07, 2018
- End Date: February 09, 2018
- Time: 12:30pm-6:30pm
- City: Revelstoke BC
- Venue: Okanagan College - 1401 1 St W, Revelstoke, BC, Rm 102
- Instructor: Dr. Carl Schwarz
Course description
Environmental impact assessments want to know if trends over time differ between control and impact sites. Statistical methods for the analysis of trends over time use many of the same methods as the analysis of experimental data (e.g. ANOVA, regression) but must now deal with problems such as autocorrelation and process error.
*This course can accommodate students using both R and JMP software.
We tried something new in response to membership requests and ran this course mid-winter in Revelstoke! This course ran on a schedule that allowed students to take up local winter recreation opportunities in the morning and/or by staying in Revelstoke for the weekend following the course.
This course has been approved by the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) as a for-credit course! Students will earn 10 continuing education credits SER’s Certified Ecological Restoration Practitioner (CERP) program.
Course content
- Review of statistical concepts on estimates, standard errors, confidence intervals, p-values, bias, precision, accuracy,
missing values, etc. - Detecting linear changes over time
Regression and non-parametric methods
Power and how many years to monitor
Dealing with seasonality and autocorrelation
Sampling vs process error
Pooling slopes (ANCOVA) - Detecting step changes over time
ANOVA and non-parametric methods
Power and how many years to monitor
Dealing with seasonality and autocorrelation
Sampling vs process error - BACI designs and variants
Simple Before and After Controlled Impact design (BACI) – Introduction to two factor ANOVA
BACI with multiple sites
BACI with multiple years/multiple sites before/after
Paired BACI with multiple years/multiple sites before/after
Regression BACI (analysis of covariance)
Power/sample size
Instructor
Dr. Carl Schwarz, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University. Carl has taught many courses with CMI, and is back by popular request!
Carl has just recently won the SSC Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work 2017.
Required software
- Base R and Rstudio (available for Mac, Linux and Windows systems) or JMP
- Adobe Reader
- Microsoft Excel
- More detailed software requirements are below
Preparation for the course
- About 2 weeks before the course you will be sent a web link where you can download pre-reading, a course manual, a set of practice exercises to load on your computer before the class, and a reminder about where to get the course software.
- You will need to bring your own laptop pre-loaded with the required software and downloaded files.
- Consider bringing along an external monitor, an external keyboard and a mouse if you have a small laptop.
- You will need to make your own hotel booking, and remember to ask for the rates we’ve arranged for people attending this course (see below).
Required software details
Base R. (available for Mac, Linux, and Windows-systems). You should have version 3.0.2 or later.
Visit http://www.r-project.org and install the most recent version on your machine.
*** IMPORTANT *** In order to install packages after R is installed, you will need either Administrative Access to your machine or a personal library on your desktop where you can install packages on the fly. If you want a personal package library, follow the instructions at: http://people.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz/CourseNotes/R-personal-library.html
For JMP students, download the 30-day trial version of the software here: http://www.jmp.com
Install the following packages PRIOR for the workshop.
View, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1P5jBthaQk OR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1r5XTqrCTQ for instructions on how to install packages. This will also test if your personal library for packages is working.
car, doBy, gdata, ggplot2, gplots, knitr,
lme4, lmerTest, lsmeans, nlme, plyr, xlsx
A VERY brief (interactive) tutorial on R is available at http://tryr.codeschool.com. Earn some badges!
Rstudio. Visit http://www.rstudio.com and install on your machine.
Adobe Reader – Your laptop needs to have Adobe Reader to access the course manual during the course. The manual is about 65 MB and will be supplied as a download prior to the course. You need at least 65 MB of free space so you can copy the manual to the hard drive and read from the hard drive during the course.
MS Excel – You will need to unzip the course exercises files before the course. Your laptop needs to have MS Excel installed for opening the un-zipped files.
Tip : Allow sufficient time for your tech support people to approve and install the software.
Thank you to our host Okanagan College
