Joel Reynolds: Biometric Intern Opportunities

Biometric Internships

Flying aerial transect surveys for estimating brown bear density on Togiak National Wildlife Refuge.

The Summer Refuges Biometric Internship is designed to (i) expose biometrics graduate students to the issues that arise in biometric consulting in the natural resources, and (ii) strengthen ties between the National Wildlife Refuge System and the research community, specifically with regards to the many biometric problems associated with monitoring biotic and abiotic resources in Alaska.

Interns gain experience addressing many of the challenges of biometric consulting -

communicating with biologists and resource managers to clarify and refine project objectives, understand design issues, explain design and analysis methods, and collaboratively interpret project results,
researching appropriate inferential methods and software,
accomodating field biology logistical constraints in data collection and sampling designs,
grappling with the bleeding edge of methodological challenges.

Interns usually spend some time in the field learning about the challenges of natural resources data collection.

Calendar

January-February - Internship Announcements sent out. Request Addition to Distribution List
March 1 - application deadline
end of March - selection announced
mid-June through August/September - internship in Anchorage, AK

Recent Interns & Projects

Mike Keim, UW QERM: (Longitudinal models) Trends in wintering marine birds, Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), Alaska.
The first analysis of this long-term monitoring project provided insight into wintering status and trends of fifteen dominant species in the Gulf of Alaska, with implications for both management and sea bird ecology. It also lead to a review paper on GEE methods we are drafting for submission to Ecology.
Abran Steele-Feldman, UW QERM: (Multi-stage Mark-Recapture) Survival of Steller's eiders staging at Izembek Lagoon, Izembek NWR.
This lead to a software interface greatly simplifying the fitting of multi-state mark recapture models with 2nd order Markovian ('memory') movement components, allowing for the the first revision in a decade of the apparent survival rates of this threatened species and providing greater insight into biological structure in the population molting at Izembek Lagoon, Alaska.
Brook Russell, Colorado State Univ. Dept. of Statistics: (Distance Estimation) Double-observer distance estimation of Brown bear density at Togiak National Wildlife Refuge.
This project, in part, focused on preparing an R library of functions for fitting the distance estimation models of Becker & Quang (In Press, Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics). The analysis provided the first statistically sound brown bear density estimates in Southwest Alaska, including estimates of associated sampling uncertainty. This project was extended into a power analysis to investigate the impact of sample size on the resulting uncertainty of the density estimate.

Return to Joel Reynolds' home page; Department of Statistics home page. Last Edit: 10 Sept 2007