Faculty of Science
E.E. van Loon
dr.ir. E.E. (Emiel) van Loon
Instituut voor Biodiversiteit en Ecosysteem Dynamica University of Amsterdam


POSTBUS 94248
1090 GE Amsterdam
Room: C 4.168

Telephone
0205257448

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/e.e.vanloon/
Email



Contact info

Statistical ecology

Observations in the natural sciences are a combination of phenomena in the natural system and the measurement system.
I am interested in developing and applying statistical and measurement theory to separate these two systems.
The topics on which I focus are bird movement at the individual level and space-time distributions of plants at the population level.

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Soaring bird migration

Recently we created an agent-based model in Matlab, which can be used to investigate soaring bird migration. The model design and an example of it's application is described in: E.E. van Loon, J. Shamoun-Baranes, W. Bouten & S.L. Davis (2011). Understanding soaring bird migration through interactions and decisions at the individual level. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 270 (1), 112-126.

get model code

get paper

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vegetation reconstruction

Boris Jansen and I developed a model to reconstruct past vegetation on the basis of biomarker data. The model is conceptually fairly simple, but performed well in the studies where it was applied so far. The model is coded in Matlab, and described in:
B. Jansen, E.E. van Loon, H. Hooghiemstra & J.M. Verstraten (2010). Improved reconstruction of palaeo-environments through unravelling of preserved vegetation biomarker patterns. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 285(1-2), 119-130.


get model code

get paper

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Mapcurves implementation

Mapcurves is a goodness-of-fit measure to compare two categorical maps by Hargrove et al. 2006. Niels Raes and I have applied it in a study to floristic regions in Borneo. For this study we coded the Mapcurves algorithm in Matlab and R.
Our Mapcurves implementation contains a Matlab function (which includes a demo option), an R function and a separate (R) demo script. The Matlab and R functions do exactly the same, but differ slightly with respect to the way in which the output is formatted. For background info about Mapcurves, see William W. Hargrove, Forrest M. Hoffman and Paul F. Hessburg (2006) Mapcurves: a quantitative method for comparing categorical maps. J Geograph Syst, 8, 187–208. DOI 10.1007/s10109-006-0025-x.


get code

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RNCEP

Michael Kemp, PhD student in our CGE-group, has created a fantastic R package to process NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (weather) data for use in our bird migration models.

We did describe the package in: Kemp M.U., E.E. van Loon, J. Shamoun-Baranes, W. Bouten (2011) RNCEP: global weather and climate data at your fingertips. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. doi: 10.1111/j.2041-210X.2011.00138.x

For anyone using weather data in ecological models, the RNCEP package may contain very useful functions.


get paper

website Michael Kemp

RNCEP at CRAN

info NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data

Teaching

I lecture in the BSc and MSc programs of the earth and biological sciences, beta-gamma and future planet studies (see the link below for an overview). These courses cover statistics and research methods in the natural sciences. In addition, I supervise MSc students during their thesis work. If you are interested in statistical or methodological issues, especially when these relate to biogeography or spatio-temporal dynamics, you may consider to conduct an MSc thesis under my supervision.



Overview of courses

Links:

the IBED-website

theCGE-website