Environmental and Ecological Statistics with R by QIAN, S. S.
Andrew O. Finley · Biometrics · 2011
In this book, author Qian's purpose is to “bridge the gap between a typical applied statistics text and the need of scientists in environmental and ecological fields.” To this end, Qian effectively blends fundamentals of scientific methods with statistical thinking, modeling, computing, and inference. Special attention is given to motivating these topics using environmental data sets with real-world policy relevance, including a thorough statistical exploration of a Florida Everglades data set used to establish U.S. Environmental Protection Agency water quality standards. Many of the illustrative data analyses used to introduce the various statistical methods are drawn from Qian's published papers. As expected with an instructional text, particular care is given to introducing modeling topics by using intuitive and instructional-level discussions on the role of the statistical methods in environmental and ecological sciences. Qian grounds much of this discussion in R. A. Fisher's early writings on statistical inference, providing students with a logical progression—identifying the research question, characterizing the data, formulating the model, and drawing valid conclusions. Clearly presented data analysis examples and graphical explanations/explorations are used, in lieu of mathematical details, to convey statistical concepts and methods. Overall, the text is well formatted with liberal use of illustrative portions of R code that appear to be incorporated via Sweave. The data sets and R code are available online and useful for further exploration and demonstration in classroom settings.