Bootcamp in Wildlife Statistics

The Department of Biological Sciences, SST, hosted a workshop (Jan 15-26) in wildlife statistics at Sunway University.   The workshop, offered by the Biodiversity Conservation Society of Sarawak and led by Mike Meredith, was attended by students and staff of NGOs and universities across Malaysia, including 4 postgraduate students from Sunway University.

Final day of the Bootcamp in Wildlife Statistics 

Wildlife data is used for making management and policy decisions that affect species conservation.  Most wildlife research deals with systems that are not amenable to normal scientific experimentation and where detection of a species is never perfect. So models, information theory, Bayesian statistics, and methods to deal with false absences are employed. The types of data collected such as presence/absence of a species or count data, do not fit a normal distribution and require different types of statistical treatment.

Workshop participants spent an intense ten days mastering concepts in study design, analysis, statistical programming and interpretation of results using real data exam