Tag Archives: predictive

“Those Things Are Evil”: Prediction Intervals in Mixed Models

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Suppose we study salamanders and want to predict body mass based on their body length. We also want to account for different access to food and differing levels of competition at each site we’ve collected our salamanders from. So we fit a linear model with a random effect for site as we only have samples from a subset of sites. (Want a refresher on random effects? We’ve got you covered.)

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Forecasting Worldwide Alien Invasions

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Image Credit: Bernard Dupont, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped

Projecting the continental accumulation of alien species through to 2050 (2020) Seebens at al., Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15333

The Crux

A by-product of globalisation is that over the coming decades, no matter how many episodes of Border Patrol get recorded, new species are going to find their way into new habitats and potentially become invasive alien species, exerting negative effects on the locals. We’ve seen this in the past, and I’ve beaten many a dead horse writing about these species on this site.

What this paper set out to find is whether or not we can predict at what scale this trend will increase.

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The Independence Assumption and its Foe, Spatial Correlation

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When animals like these wolves travel in packs, spotting one individual means we're more likely to spot another soon after. So how do we come up with a reliable population estimate in situations like these? (Image Credit: Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped)

When animals like these wolves travel in packs, spotting one individual means we’re more likely to spot another soon after. So how do we come up with a reliable population estimate in situations like these? (Image Credit: Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped)

The thought of an ecologist may conjure the image of a scientist spending their time out in the field counting birds, looking for moss, studying mushrooms. Yet whilst field ecologists remain an integral part of modern ecology, the reality is that much of the discipline has come to rely on complex models. These are the processes which allow us to estimate figures like the 1 billion animals that have died in the recent Australian bushfires, or the potential spread of species further polewards as climate change warms our planet.

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