Success for School in Secure Feasibility Call

The SECURE (Statistics of Environmental Change, Resources and Ecosystems) network is a network of statisticians, modelers and environmental scientists funded by EPSRC.  The Principal Investigator for the network is Professor Marian Scott from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow.  The network’s vision is to bring together data providers and researchers from the environmental sciences with the statistical community to provide fresh intelligence and new insights into environmental change and society’s management of that change.

Each year the network commissions the best four or five Feasibility Projects submitted from Universities and institutions throughout the UK.  The six month long projects need to have at least one partner from each of the statistical and environmental science communities.

Dr Lauren Parry of the Interdisciplinary department, based at the Dumfries campus of the University of Glasgow has been successful as the Lead Applicant on SECURE’s second Project Feasibility Call. Together with Dr Duncan Lee and Dr Surajit Ray from our School, the team will be looking at “Improved approaches for mapping and modelling blanket peatland extent and depth”.

This project will include looking at the role of statistical methods in potentially improving estimation and mapping, and assessing the extent to which cutting edge statistical methodology can bridge the gap in peat depth model development, by new interdisciplinary collaboration between the environmental and statistical communities.

On the same call Professor Adrian Bowman, our Head of the School, was another successful Lead Applicant. Adrian’s second year PhD Student, George Vazanellis, will also be working on the project. The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, through Alan Hills and Ted Schlicke, is a partner on the project “Modelling and visualisation tools for water quality in the Clyde Estuary”.

The aim of the project is to gain significant insight into the water quality changes in the Clyde Estuary over the last 40 years and to communicate these insights effectively to a wide range of stakeholders.  The project will involve developing a model which describes the changes in water quality in the Clyde Estuary over the past 40 years.