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Reliable estimates of the size of natural populations are required by national and regional governments for management and conservation, by international commissions that manage natural resources, and by NGOs. Distance sampling, in which distances of animals from a line or point are sampled, is the most widely-applicable technique for obtaining such estimates. Statisticians at St Andrews are the acknowledged world-leaders in the development and dissemination of distance sampling survey methods. Their software Distance is the industry standard and has over 30,000 registered users from around 115 countries. The methodological developments and associated software have allowed better-informed decisions to be made in the management and conservation of populations as diverse as whales, seals, fish, elephants, apes, deer, birds, ants, trees and flowering plants.
Research on the distribution, abundance and sensitivity to disturbance of marine predators has been translated into environmental and economic benefits via a series of spin-out companies with a global presence. The research enabled the following impacts:
Direct company earnings were ~£6 million turnover in the assessment period and this supported 24 employees two-thirds of whom are skilled specialists.
The impact of statistical ecology research at Kent is on both the survey design of data collection on wild animals, and the analysis of the resulting data. As a result of our research, better quality data are being collected more efficiently, and a wide range of new methods of data analysis are being used. This is essential for the conservation and management of wild animal populations and the preservation of biodiversity. New methods developed at Kent are now standard tools used in ecology. Examples of impact are improved understanding of the decline of British farmland birds, underpinning conservation action plans; and analysis of data from tiger surveys, supporting the Indonesian Government's National Tiger Recovery Plan.
Achievement of energy security and the UK's 2020 carbon targets economy depends upon a mix of new offshore oil and gas and renewable energy developments, but concern that seismic survey and construction noise could pose an unacceptable risk to marine mammals threatens to delay these plans.
University of Aberdeen ecologists, under the direction of Paul Thompson, have developed long-term studies of marine mammal population dynamics that now underpin frameworks for assessing and mitigating the impacts of such developments on marine mammals in EU protected areas.
The specific impact on commerce and the environment is that this assessment process has been adopted by industry within their consent applications. As a result of academic consultancy in industry, planning decisions have been informed by the research, and the management of environmental risks has changed. This has reduced the consenting risk for industry and provided an assessment framework that allows regulators to ensure that they are implementing current government policy within international legal frameworks for environmental protection.
Research by St Andrews scientists studying the effects of naval Sonar on marine mammals has had the following international impacts:
Small area estimation (SAE) describes the use of Bayesian modelling of survey and administrative data in order to provide estimates of survey responses at a much finer level than is possible from the survey alone. Over the recent past, academic publications have mostly targeted the development of the methodology for SAE using small-scale examples. Only predictions on the basis of realistically sized samples have the potential to impact on governance and our contribution is to fill a niche by delivering such SAEs on a national scale through the use of a scaling method. The impact case study concerns the use of these small area predictions to develop disease-level predictions for some 8,000 GPs in England and so to produce a funding formula for use in primary care that has informed the allocation of billions of pounds of NHS money. The value of the model has been recognised in NHS guidelines. The methodology has begun to have impact in other areas, including the BIS `Skills for Life' survey.
The WinBUGS software (and now OpenBUGS software), developed initially at Cambridge from 1989-1996 and then further at Imperial from 1996-2007, has made practical MCMC Bayesian methods readily available to applied statisticians and data analysts. The software has been instrumental in facilitating routine Bayesian analysis of a vast range of complex statistical problems covering a wide spectrum of application areas, and over 20 years after its inception, it remains the leading software tool for applied Bayesian analysis among both academic and non-academic communities internationally. WinBUGS had over 30,000 registered users as of 2009 (the software is now open-source and users are no longer required to register) and a Google search on the term `WinBUGS' returns over 205,000 hits (over 42,000 of which are since 2008) with applications as diverse as astrostatistics, solar radiation modelling, fish stock assessments, credit risk assessment, production of disease maps and atlases, drug development and healthcare provider profiling.
The Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) in St Andrews designs, builds and supplies instrumentation and software essential for marine mammal tracking. Specific impacts are:
Since 2008, statistical research at the University of Bristol has significantly influenced policies, practices and tools aimed at evaluating and promoting the quality of institutional and student learning in the education sector in the UK and internationally. These developments have also spread beyond the education sector and influence the inferential methods employed across government and other sectors. The underpinning research develops methodologies and a much-used suite of associated software packages that allows effective inference from complicated data structures, which are not well-modelled using traditional statistical techniques that assume homogeneity across observational units. The ability to analyse complicated data (such as pupil performance measures when measured alongside school, classroom, context and community factors) has resulted in a significant transformation of government and institutional policies and their practices in the UK, and recommendations in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) policy documents. These techniques for transforming complex data into useful evidence are well-used across the UK civil service, with consequent policy shifts in areas such as higher education admissions and the REF2014 equality and diversity criteria.
Dr Lusseau's work at the University of Aberdeen into the impact of man's activities on wild animals has led to changes in public and environmental policies in several nations as well as changes in international policies. He developed insights as well as modelling approaches to understand the consequences of human disturbances on the viability of animal populations.
The Aberdeen work has led to a change in the way the environmental impact of a range of industries — including tourism, marine renewable energy and oil & gas — is assessed. Lusseau developed best approaches to manage the disruptions of animal behaviour that those activities created to ensure that those disturbances do not endanger the viability of wild animal populations.
Specifically this research resulted in impact that influenced international policy development and international planning processes. It also informed planning decisions and changed the way environmental risks and hazards are managed in the UK, USA, and New Zealand, and informed changes in legislations and regulations in the USA, UK and New Zealand.