Editorial: Advances in Statistical Ecology: New Methods and Software
G. Guillot, Ali Arab, Janine Illian, Stéphane Dray · Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution · 2022
ecological processes and from sampling. To adequately analyze data resulting from ecological studies, complex statistical tools are used and developed that reflect the specific sampling methods common to ecological data. This special issue brings together eight contributions in the field of statistical and computational ecology that discuss a variety of ecological data structures and associated statistical modelling approaches applied in variety of different ecological contexts. These Despite the diversity of statistical methods, topics and ecological systems, a common theme in the different contributions is the move away from the mere description of patterns in ecological data per se towards the modelling of ecological processes that generate these patterns. This special issue illustrates how this development has been facilitated by the recent development of advanced computational statistical methods and techniques such as parallel MCMC or variational methods.These methods enable the fitting of statistical models, which were unthinkable in the field only fifteen years ago. While this selection of papers has certainly been biased towards our own research interests, from a more general perspective highlights the wide-ranging contribution the R language and the broader R ecosystem have made to both theoretical and applied biosciences.