STATISTICS SEMINAR- Jan. 29

Join former University of Manitoba Alumni, Dr. Carl Schwarz from Simon Fraser University for his talk on Wednesday, January 29th about “Monitoring Illegally Killed Elephants (MIKE) in Africa – A Bayesian Approach”.

ABSTRACT:

CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is an international agreement between governments. Its aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. One of CITES projects is the Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) Programme. MIKE is a site-based system. When an elephant carcass is found, local site personnel try to establish and record the cause of death and other details. This information is recorded in standardized forms, details of which are then consolidated and submitted to the MIKE programme for analysis. This information enables MIKE to identify any changes in poaching pressure, and to develop both sub-regional and a continent-wide picture of the extent of and trends in the illegal killing of elephants.

The MIKE project has been collecting data since 2002. The data is extremely messy with vastly differing number of monitored carcasses, irregular and (in some cases) extreme amount of missing data. In this talk, we present a Bayesian analysis of this data and discuss its strengths and limitations.

DATE: Wednesday, January 29th, 2020

WHERE: Robert B. Schultz Lecture Theatre

WHEN: 4:00pm

 

Learn more here
Jan 7, 2020