Trend Analysis and Environmental Impact Assessment

  • Start Date: November 18, 2014
  • End Date: November 20, 2014
  • Time: 8am-4pm
  • City: Revelstoke, BC
  • Venue: Regent Hotel
  • 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.

 

Course content

  1. Review of statistical concepts on estimates, standard errors, confidence intervals, p-values, bias, precision, accuracy,
    missing values, etc.
  2. 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)
  3. 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
  4. 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

Schwarz

 

 

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!

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 and an external keyboard 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).

**You course starts at 8:30 a.m. sharp, you will need to arrive before that so you can set up your computer.

 

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.

For questions about course content and software, please contact:  Dr. Carl Schwarz at cschwarz@stat.sfu.ca

For questions about registration, contact the CMI office, office@cmiae.org

 

 

 

Contact

  • Phone 250-837-9311
  • Fax 250-837-9311
  • Email

Mailing Address

  • P.O. Box 2568
  • Revelstoke, British Columbia V0E 2S0
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