Bozeman Environmental and Ecological Statistics (BEES) Research Group

Statistical research motivated by environmental and ecological applications.

We are currently recruiting BS, MS, and PHD students in Statistics at Montana State University.
Additional information and a pre-application form is available through the MSU website. We are currently meeting on the first and third Thursday of each month. For a review of past meetings, please visit this archive. For upcoming events, see the calendar below.

Current Members

We are a collection of statisticians in Bozeman, Montana that includes government statisticians at the US Geological Survey's (USGS) Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK) and Montana State University (MSU) faculty and students.

  • Hoegh
    Dr. Andy Hoegh

    Andy is a Statistics faculty member at MSU.

  • Banner
    Dr. Katharine Banner

    Katie is a Statistics faculty member at MSU.

  • Irvine
    Dr. Kathryn Irvine

    Kathi is a research statistician at the U.S. Geological Survey.

  • Hoegh
    Dr. John Smith

    John is a Statistics faculty member at MSU.

  • Laga
    Dr. Ian Laga

    Ian is a Statistics faculty member at MSU.

  • Stratton
    Dr. Christian Stratton

    Christian is a former PhD student at MSU and current post-doc.

  • Winder
    Meaghan Winder

    Meaghan is a current PhD student at MSU.

  • Hardy
    Carol Hardy

    Carol is a consultant for consulting services at MSU.

  • Oram
    Jacob Oram

    Jacob is a current PhD student at MSU.

  • Hammond
    Will Hammond

    Will is a current Master's student at MSU.

Current Projects

Here is a brief description of ongoing and upcoming research projects

Bats and Stats

In collaboration with the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABAT) we have developed sampling framework and statistical methodology to improve ecological understanding of bats through robust survey design and models for bat acoustic data.

Pathogen Spillover

Spillover is defined as the transmission of pathogen from a reservoir host, such as a bat, to an intermediate host or directly to humans. We are currently studying the mechanisms of pathogen spillover using a variety of statistical techniques including: pooled testing, data integration, and Bayesian network models.

Animal Movement Models

We are actively studying the movement patterns of both grizzly bears and flying foxes. Recent work has extended techniques of agent-based models for collective animal movement. Future work will use radar technology to determine movement patterns of flying foxes.

Aquatic Invasive Species

Occupancy models account for imperfect data collection when a species may be present but not observed. We have used and are developing a variety of occupancy models for plankton tow detection of zebra mussels and hierarchical occupancy models for environmental DNA data collection.

Latest Publications

Here is a collection of recent publications by the group.

msocc: Fit and analyse computationally efficient multi‐scale occupancy models in r.

Christian Stratton, Adam Sepulveda, and Andrew Hoegh
manuscript link

Modeling Partially Surveyed Point Process Data: Inferring Spatial Point Intensity of Geomagnetic Anomalies.

Kenneth Flagg, Andrew Hoegh, John Borkowski
manuscript link
Estimating Viral Prevalence with Data Integration for Adaptive Two-Phase Pooled Sampling
Andy Hoegh, Wyatt Madden, and collaborators
Manuscript Link
Why Bayesian ideas should be introduced in the Statistics curricula and how to do so
Andy Hoegh
Manuscript Link
Agent-Based Models for Collective Animal Movement: Proximity-Induced State Switching
Andy Hoegh and collaborators
Manuscript Link
Spatial log-Gaussian Cox process models and sampling paths: towards optimal design
Kenny Flagg and Andy Hoegh
The use of Bayesian priors in Ecology: The good, the bad and the not great
Katie Banner, Kathi Irvine, and Tom Rodhouse
manuscript link
Considerations for assessing model averaging of regression coefficients.
Katie Banner and Megan Higgs
manuscript link
Pool samples to efficiently estimate pathogen prevalence dynamics
Braden Scherting, Ali Peel, Raina Plowright, Andy Hoegh
Evaluating and presenting uncertainty in model-based unconstrained ordination
Andy Hoegh and Dave Roberts
Manuscript Link

Group Alumni

  • Madden
    Wyatt Madden

    Wyatt is a PhD student at Emory Biostat.

  • Flagg
    Dr. Kenny Flagg

    Kenny is a data scientist at Vizion.

  • Bartley
    Dr. Meredith Bartley

  • Scherting
    Braden Scherting

    Braden is a PhD student at Duke.