Vernon Visser, a research officer in SEEC in the Department of Statistical Sciences, will present the Department of Statistical Sciences seminar, with a talk entitled, ".Statistical tools for evaluating potential geographical and niche overlap between species"

Vernon trained as an ecologist at UCT and the University of Sheffield. Thereafter he tried his hand at invasion biology at the CIB at Stellenbosch University. Currently he is attempting to apply different and more statistical techniques to a range of ecological questions. However, he is primarily interested in the field of biogeography: the study of where species occur and what determines them being there.

 In the last decade satellites have made it possible to gather environmental data for the entire globe and at high spatial resolutions. At the same time, broadscale distribution data for literally thousands of species has become freely and easily available. This has allowed us to interrogate and understand species distributions in greater detail than ever before. In this talk I will highlight two major areas of research that are allowing us to predict competition between species due to shared geographical and niche occupancy.