The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) announces the establishment of the Environmental Statistics Collaborative (ESC), a new initiative that will offer state-of-the-art education in environmental statistics to UMCES graduate students, provide research expertise to faculty researchers, and offer consulting services to partners in the scientific and natural resource management community. The Institute will open in August 2014 for consulting and research services and will teach its first course for students in January 2015.
“The new Environmental Statistics Collaborative reflects our commitment to provide our students, faculty and partners with the best possible tools to study and solve the world’s pressing environmental challenges,” said Dr. Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Based at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Maryland, the Collaborative will be a clearinghouse for environmental measurements, giving students and scientists the ability to apply new approaches to obtain policy relevant information. The group will help plan studies, utilize information from existing data sets, and analyze environmental data to approach environmental problems in new ways.
The Environmental Statistics Collaborative is connected by modern video- and voice-communication technologies to UMCES’ state-wide laboratory network. It will eventually grow to three Ph.D.-level statisticians, but will debut with two–Dr. Dong Liang, an expert in spatial processes, and Dr. Slava Lyubchich, who has expertise time series analysis, forecasting, applied statistics, and environmental modeling.
“The amount of data available at the click of the mouse is quite remarkable,” said Dr. Thomas Miller, director of the UMCES Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. “This center will allow us to apply new approaches to this vast amount of information to try to obtain policy relevant information.”
The new network recognizes UMCES’ mission to provide actionable science to the citizens of Maryland and our state, federal and other partners.
“We have been collecting temperature measurements from our pier on the Patuxent River since 1938 and now have more than 19,000 daily records,” noted Miller. “When we refurbished the pier this year, we installed modern sensors to record the environment and have recorded more than 27,000 temperature observations since January. The new ESC will directly address the challenges with working with the vast amount of data we now have at our fingertips.”
