The National Centre for Statistical Ecology

The National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE) is a joint research centre between the Universities of Kent, Cambridge and St Andrews.  It was established in 2005 with the aid of a mathematics Multidisciplinary Critical Mass Award from EPSRC.

The main focus of research at NCSE has been the development of methodologies for modelling the dynamics of animal populations and fitting these models to time series of data.  The fitting algorithms developed are based on three different approaches.  The first of these is the Kalman filter, used together with maximum likelihood methods.  The other two approaches both use Bayesian methods, with model fitting carried out using either Markov chain Monte Carlo or sequential importance sampling.

NCSE is steadily broadening its areas of research expertise and activities.  Active areas of research include animal movement models, metapopulation models, community models, distance sampling, mark-recapture, biodiversity monitoring, random effects models in ecology, modelling ecological point process data and parameter redundancy in ecological models.