Environmental Statistics: Analysing Data for Environmental Policy - No. 220

Environmental statistics is a rapidly growing discipline that is important not only as a division of professional and academic statistics, but also in the accumulation of data on environmental effects and in the formulation of environmental policy by government agencies. This book features contributions from policy makers, scientists actively involved in collection of data, and professional, academic and government statisticians. These explore the interfaces between the different areas of application of environmental statistics and consider the future applications of methods arising from this discipline. Some of the chapters deal specifically with environmental models and methods. Here, the contributors explain specialized statistical techniques that have been developed for analysing environmental data and mathematical models that have been applied to the problem of integrating large amounts of environmental data into a coherent picture of particular environmental systems. Several of the contributions deal specifically with the problems involved in co-ordinating data collection over large geographical areas and over many dimensions of measurement. Finally, the book discusses the problems of formulating specific environmental policies given the nature of the information that has been made available using environmental statistical methods.