CSU-CAS Faculty trains on Wildlife Data Analysis in Malaysia

Ms. Chennie Solania of the Department of Biology under the College of Arts and Sciences attended the Boot Camp in Wildlife Study Design and Data Analysis in Sunway University, Selangor, Malaysia last January 7-18, 2019. The activity was sponsored by Sunway University and Biodiversity Conservation Society of Sarawak in which participants were coming from Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, and United Kingdom.

The boot camp aimed to train individuals involved in research, conservation, and wildlife management. Topics that were discussed mostly dealt with Poisson and binomial distributions, density and population studies, simple linear regression and logistic regression, model selection, Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and Bayesian analysis. Modelling, sampling design and strategies (dealing with bias and sampling error), survival estimates and occupancy, multi-season data and project consultations were covered in the last five days of the workshop using R statistical software. The knowledge obtained from the boot-camp is relevant to the current researches undertaken by the Biology department and can be disseminated to interested faculty and students working on wildlife conservation.