It's been a few months now since our last update, and plenty has been happening during that time, which is why we haven't posted an update!
A new statistician starts at Proteus
The biggest news is that Dr Penelope Bilton (pictured with Darryl) has recently joined our team. Penelope graduated from Massey University with a PhD in Statistics in 2016, after deciding to return to university following a teaching career and raising her family. She joins us with previous consulting experience, having worked on on a range of projects, both in ecology and industry. Check out her bio page for more detail on the type of projects she has consulted on. Penelope will be working primarily with Darryl on a couple of protected species projects for the NZ Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), and will also work on aspects of projects for other clients. Welcome to Proteus Penelope!
MacKenzie et al. (2002) hits 3000 citations
According to Google, Darryl's seminal 2002 occupancy modelling paper hit 3000 citations last month! Different organisations calculate the number of citations differently, but regardless of the 'true' number Darryl says that it's pretty humbling to see one of his earliest papers be cited, and used, so widely. He and his co-authors thought they were being quite cheeky submitting the paper with a monitoring focus to the high-profile ecological journal Ecology, and had no idea that the method would take off as it did. Dozens of papers, a book (now in it's second edition) and over 60 short-courses later, Darryl is still as interested in the topic as ever and thinks there's still plenty of scope for novel applications and extensions of the methods.
What have we been working on?
The end of 2018 was a pretty hectic period for us, starting on a major project for MPI related to assessing anthropogenic impacts on protected species (which we'll provide more details on in the future), along with numerous smaller projects, including:
- estimating kangaroo abundance using distance sampling
- camera trapping study on quolls
- pygmy possums in nest boxes
- pond breeding amphibians in Western Australia
- leopard occupancy/abundance in a region of Pakistan
Quite a wide variety of topics, keeping everyday interesting. Contact us if you have a project you need some help with.