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Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science
EPA Grant Number: R829402Center: Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science
Center Director: Stein, Michael
Title: Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science
Investigators: Stein, Michael , Amit, Yali , Beletsky, Dmitry , Chay, Kenneth , Dukic, Vanja , Dwyer, Greg , Eshel, Gidon , Frederick, John , Greenstone, Michael , Kotamarthi, V. Rao , Lesht, Barry , McCullagh, Peter , Meng, Xiao-Li , Naureckas, Edward , Pfister, Cathy , Rathouz, Paul , Reinsel, Gregory , Schwab, David , Solway, Julian , Tiao, George , Weatherhead, Elizabeth , Wootton, Timothy , Wuebbles, Donald J.
Current Investigators: Stein, Michael
Institution: University of Chicago , Argonne National Laboratory , National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , University of California - Berkeley , University of Colorado , University of Illinois at Urbana , University of Miami , University of Wisconsin - Madison
Current Institution: University of Chicago
EPA Project Officer: Smith, Bernice
Project Period: March 12, 2002 through March 11, 2007
Project Amount: $6,250,049
RFA: Environmental Statistics Center (2001)
Research Category: Ecological Indicators/Assessment/Restoration , Environmental Statistics
Description:
Objective:The Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science will support research in the development of new statistical methods for addressing environmental problems and for integrating the use of statistics throughout the process of risk assessment. The Center's main objective is to advance the use of statistical methods to assess the state of the physical environment and its impact on human and ecological health. Specific research problems of the Center's initial projects include investigating the relationship between air pollution and respiratory illnesses, statistical design and analysis for estimating trends in environmental indicators, approaches to combining numerical models and statistical methods, quasi-experimentation to assess the relationship between infant mortality and particulate air pollution, and the development of stochastic models and model selection procedures for complex ecological systems. The other primary objective of our Center is to educate a new generation of environmental statisticians and statistically sophisticated environmental scientists.
Approach:To achieve the Center's research objectives, we will build teams of statisticians and researchers from other disciplines dedicated to working on the critical environmental problems we have identified. Investigators on the initial projects are drawn from a large number of disciplines from several universities and from government laboratories. The strengths of UC and one of our major collaborators, Argonne National Laboratory, in the fields of environmental science and large-scale computation, will, with the cooperation of ORD scientists, catalyze the development of innovative approaches to identify, address, and apply statistics to issues in environmental science. The Center's activities will foster constant interaction between project teams with overlapping interests. The theme of integration applies not just to integration of people and ideas from different disciplines, but also to the integration of numerical and statistical models, of data sources, and of science and policy. All of our initial projects are built around specific environmental processes, models and data sets. This approach enables environmental objectives to define the statistical research and makes it possible to evaluate the utility of the resulting statistical developments in assessing the state of the environment and its impact on human and ecological health. In addition, we plan to use statistical methods for improving deterministic and stochastic models for environmental and ecological processes, which will produce more powerful analyses of available data. Monitoring design issues, we feel, are best addressed in the context of specific environmental problems, which will afford researchers the opportunity to grapple with the multivariate spatio-temporal nature of environmental processes to the fullest extent possible.
Our educational programs are also designed to support intellectual integration. A central aspect of our educational program will be the joint mentorship of all graduate students (and postdocs) receiving funding through the program. In almost all cases, this will mean one statistical mentor and one mentor from another discipline. We view the statistical education of environmental scientists and policymakers to be of equal importance as the environmental education of statisticians and we will support students and postdocs in fields such as geophysical sciences, economics, and ecology in addition to statistics. We will take advantage of existing programs throughout the University of Chicago to encourage interaction between statisticians and other researchers and students interested in environmental problems. To help integrate EPA researchers into our research and broaden the education of our students and postdocs, we will fund summer internships at ORD or other appropriate facilities.
Regularly sponsored public events will disseminate what we have learned and afford us opportunities to learn from, and interact with, the broader scientific communities. These activities will include some extended conferences and a much larger number of shorter events including debates, panel discussions and other formats designed to encourage interaction of researchers from different disciplines.
Expected Results:The Center's research will advance statistical methods that can be widely used as part of states' and tribes' risk assessment activities. Thus, our results will impact a much wider range of problems than the specific topics of our initial projects. For example, given the large role that numerical models play in risk assessment, the methods we develop for ecological model selection and integration of model output and monitoring data will provide states and tribes with tools for more effective use of complex dynamical models.
Although we will not initially focus on methods of risk management, we will analyze the effect past environmental legislation has had on urban areas. We believe that careful retrospective analysis of past policies is essential to the development of future regulatory policies and thus plays a crucial role in risk management.
The statisticians and other scientists we educate will provide a long-lasting benefit to the environmental statistics community. Through publications, public events and web pages, we will widely publicize our research results and educational innovations and raise the awareness and understanding of statistical issues throughout the environmental research community.
Journal Articles: 37 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
| Other center views: | All 102 publications | 59 publications in selected types | All 37 journal articles |
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Anderes EB, Stein ML. Estimating deformations of isotropic Gaussian random fields on the plane. Annals of Statistics 2008;36(2):719-741. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Chay K, Dobkin C, Greenstone M. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and adult mortality. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 2003;27(3):279-300. |
R829402C004 (2002) R829402C004 (Final) |
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Currie J, Neidell M. Air pollution and infant health: what can we learn from California’s recent experience? The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2005;120(3):1003-1030. |
R829402C004 (Final) |
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Dwyer G, Morris WF. Resource-dependent dispersal and the speed of biological invasions. The American Naturalist 2006;167(2):165-176. |
R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Elderd BD, Doak DF. Comparing the direct and community-mediated effects of disturbance on plant population dynamics: flooding, herbivory, and Mimulus guttatus. Journal of Ecology 2006;94(3):656-669. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Elderd BD, Dukic VM, Dwyer G. Uncertainty in predictions of disease spread and public health responses to bioterrorism and emerging diseases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2006;103(42):15693-15697. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Eshel G, Bernstein J. Relationship between large-scale atmospheric states, subsidence, static stability and ground-level ozone in Illinois, USA. Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 2006;171(1-4):111-133. |
R829402C003 (2002) R829402C003 (Final) |
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Guillas S, Stein ML, Wuebbles DJ, Xia J. Using chemistry transport modeling in statistical analysis of stratospheric ozone trends from observations. Journal of Geophysical Research 2004;109(D22303), doi:10.1029/2004JD005049. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (Final) R829402C002 (2004) |
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Guillas S, Tiao GC, Wuebbles DJ, Zubrow A. Statistical diagnostic and correction of a chemistry-transport model for the prediction of total column ozone. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2006;6(2):525-537. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (Final) |
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Im HK, Stein ML, Kotamarthi VR. A new approach to scenario analysis using simplified chemical transport models. Journal of Geophysical Research 2005;110(D24205), doi:10.1029/2005JD006417. |
R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Im HK, Stein ML, Zhu Z. Semiparametric estimation of spectral density with irregular observations. Journal of the American Statistical Association 2007;102(478):726-735. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Jun M, Stein ML. Statistical comparison of observed and CMAQ modeled daily sulfate levels. Atmospheric Environment 2004;38(27):4427-4436. |
R829402C002 (2004) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Jun M, Stein ML. An approach to producing space-time covariance functions on spheres. Technometrics 2007;49(4):468-479. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Kusumo HT, Pfister CA, Wootton JT. Small-scale genetic structure in the sea palm Postelsia palmaeformis Ruprecht (Phaeophyceae). Marine Biology 2006;149(4):731-742. |
R829402C005 (2006) |
not available |
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Loh JM, Stein ML. Spatial bootstrap with increasing observations in a fixed domain. Statistica Sinica 2008;18(2):667-688. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Miller AJ, Cai A, Tiao G, Wuebbles DJ, Flynn LE, Yang S-K, Weatherhead EC, Fioletov V, Petropavlovskikh I, Meng X-L, Guillas S, Nagatani RM, Reinsel GC. Examination of ozonesonde data for trends and trend changes incorporating solar and Arctic oscillation signals. Journal of Geophysical Research 2006;111(D13305), doi:10.1029/2005JD006684. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (2006) R829402C001 (Final) |
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Naureckas ET, Dukic V, Bao X, Rathouz P. Short-acting β-agonist prescription fills as a marker for asthma morbidity. Chest 2005;128(2):602-608. |
R829402C003 (2004) R829402C003 (2006) R829402C003 (Final) |
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Neidell MJ. Air pollution, health, and socio-economic status: the effect of outdoor air quality on childhood asthma. Journal of Health Economics 2004;23(6):1209-1236. |
R829402C004 (Final) |
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Pfister CA, Wang M. Beyond size: matrix projection models for populations where size is an incomplete descriptor. Ecology 2005;86(10):2673-2683. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Reinsel GC, Miller AJ, Weatherhead EC, Flynn LE, Nagatani RM, Tiao GC, Wuebbles DJ. Trend analysis of total ozone data for turnaround and dynamical contributions. Journal of Geophysical Research 2005;110(D16306), doi:10.1029/2004JD004662. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (Final) |
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Shao X, Stein ML. Statistical conditional simulation of a multiresolution numerical air quality model. Journal of Geophysical Research 2006;111(D15211), doi:10.1029/2005JD007037. |
R829402 (2006) R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Shao X, Stein M, Ching J. Statistical comparisons of methods for interpolating the output of a numerical air quality model. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 2007;137(7):2277-2293. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Space-time covariance functions. Journal of the American Statistical Association 2005;100(469):310-321. |
R829402C002 (2002) R829402C002 (2004) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Statistical methods for regular monitoring data. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 2005;67(5):667-687. |
R829402C002 (2004) R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Seasonal variations in the spatial-temporal dependence of total column ozone. Environmetrics 2007;18(1):71-86. |
R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Spatial variation of total column ozone on a global scale. Annals of Applied Statistics 2007;1(1):191-210. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. A modeling approach for large spatial datasets. Journal of the Korean Statistical Society 2008;37(1):3-10. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Sun L, Wang M. An algorithm for a decomposition of weighted digraphs: with applications to life cycle analysis in ecology. Journal of Mathematical Biology 2007;54(2):199-226. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Tebaldi C, Hayhoe K, Arblaster JM, Meehl GA. Going to the extremes: an intercomparison of model-simulated historical and future changes in extreme events. Climatic Change 2006;79(3-4):185-211. |
R829402C006 (2006) R829402C006 (Final) |
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Tsao JI, Wootton JT, Bunikis J, Luna MG, Fish D, Barbour AG. An ecological approach to preventing human infection: vaccinating wild mouse reservoirs intervenes in the Lyme disease cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2004;101(52):18159-18164. |
R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Vrac M, Stein ML, Hayhoe K, Liang X-Z. A general method for validating statistical downscaling methods under future climate change. Geophysical Research Letters 2007;34(L18701), doi:10.1029/2007GL030295. |
R829402C006 (Final) R830963 (Final) |
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Vrac M, Hayhoe K, Stein M. Identification and intermodel comparison of seasonal circulation patterns over North America. International Journal of Climatology 2007;27(5):603-620. |
R829402C006 (Final) |
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Vrac M, Stein M, Hayhoe K. Statistical downscaling of precipitation through nonhomogeneous stochastic weather typing. Climate Research 2007;34(3):169-184. |
R829402C006 (Final) |
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Wootton JT. Field parameterization and experimental test of the neutral theory of biodiversity. Nature 2005;433(7023):309-312 (letter). |
R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Zhang Z, Beletsky D, Schwab DJ, Stein ML. Assimilation of current measurements into a circulation model of Lake Michigan. Water Resources Research 2007;43(W11407), doi:10.1029/2006WR005818. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Zhang Z, Switzer P. Stochastic space-time regional rainfall modeling adapted to historical rain gauge data. Water Resources Research 2007;43(W03441), doi:10.1029/2005WR004654. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Zubrow A, Chen L, Kotamarthi VR. EAKF-CMAQ: Introduction and evaluation of a data assimilation for CMAQ based on the ensemble adjustment Kalman filter. Journal of Geophysical Research 2008;113(D09302), doi:10.1029/2007JD009267. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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atmosphere, ozone, water, watersheds, stratospheric ozone, chemical transport, ecological effects, particulates, environmental chemistry, environmental policy, Great Lakes, EPA Region 5, air quality, health effects, regulation, ecosystem sustainability,
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Economic, Social, & Behavioral Science Research Program, Scientific Discipline, RFA, Environmental Statistics, Health Risk Assessment, Ecological Risk Assessment, risk assessment, ambient airborne particulate matter, environmental indicators, health risk analysis, biostatistics, statistical methods, air pollution, data analysis, environmental risks, infant mortality
Progress and Final Reports:
2004 Progress Report
2006 Progress Report
Final Report
Subprojects under this Center:
(EPA does not fund or establish subprojects; EPA awards and manages the overall grant for this center).
R829402C001 Detection of a Recovery in Stratospheric and Total Ozone
R829402C002 Integrating Numerical Models and Monitoring Data
R829402C003 Air Quality and Reported Asthma Incidence in Illinois
R829402C004 Quasi-Experimental Evidence on How Airborne Particulates Affect Human Health
R829402C005 Model Choice Stochasticity, and Ecological Complexity
R829402C006 Statistical Approaches to Detection and Downscaling of Climate Variability and Change