Dr Henri Laurie will present the Department of Statistical Science seminar with a talk entitled, "Multifractality and spatial pattern in ecology". 

Henri Laurie  is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. Henri Laurie came to applied mathematics after a career that included stints as camera operator, translator, actor and school teacher. He taught mathematics at Khanya College and graduated from UCT with a PhD supervised by Richard Cowling and Daya Reddy. He has worked in description of spatial pattern, population dynamics and industrial mathematics, and has been a member of UCT Maths and Applied Maths since 1995.

Abstract: Multifractals have been used to describe a number of ecological  densities. I discuss the multifractal MFp1p2, and apply it to species-area relationships and an abundance-area relationships, mostly using data from South Africa.

This raises two questions:
               
1. Should the traditional view of a functional SAR and related
 area-based properties be abandoned in favour of the SAR as a
 type of probability distribution?

2. Whether inference is possible based on multifractal descriptions. For example, how different do the parameters estimated using MFp1p2 have to be for one to say they are significantly different?