Vianey Leos Barajas

Call for abstracts is now open for the next International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) taking place on January 8-15, 2027, in Mérida, México!

Abstract submission form can be accessed through the website: statisticalecology.org

Deadline: May 1, 2026 (anywhere on earth)

🦋🇲🇽📉👩🏽‍💻

Book cover for https://oliviergimenez.github.io/banana-book/

📘 New book out soon !

I’m excited to share that 𝐁𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞-𝐑𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐇𝐢𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐨𝐯 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐑 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐍𝐈𝐌𝐁𝐋𝐄 is being published by Chapman & Hall / CRC Press

Hope it’s useful to students, researchers, and practitioners

#StatisticalEcology #NIMBLE

Nearly 15 years ago, I discovered @isec-stats-ecol.bsky.social as a first year PhD student and knew it was my dream conference/community.

Haven’t missed one since & now I get to bring it to México. Que padre unir mi comunidad académica y mi gente 🇲🇽 🌎

bsky.app/profile/isec...

BTW, ISEC 2027 call for abstracts now open: statisticalecology.org

Organizing a conference can be a bit stressful, but sending mass emails when my cat likes to jump on my keyboard just as I'm about to hit send....complete panic.

The culprit:

ISEC 2027 will offer 14(!) workshops over the course of 2 days, Jan 8-9, 2027.

Incredibly excited & thankful to all of our instructors. 🦋🇲🇽📉👩🏽‍💻

Check out the workshop titles on the main page, statisticalecology.org, and full information here: statisticalecology.org?page_id=742

StanCon 2026 Oral presentation deadline (25th of February) Hi all, Just a quick reminder for StanCon 2026 (Uppsala, 17–21 August): if you’re planning to give an oral presentation, the submission deadline is 25 February (AoE). If you have a talk in mind, plea...

🔥🔥 StanCon 2026 Oral Presentation Submission Deadline on the 25th of February 🔥🔥

discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stancon-20...

A lot of Bayesian workshops — I would like to state publicly that I didn’t plan it this way, it’s just a happy coincidence 😹

statisticalecology.org?page_id=742 👀👀

The fifth annual Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition is open!
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/02/11/t...

Slowly populating the ISEC website with accepted workshop info, if anyone wants to take a peek 👀 statisticalecology.org

Official announcements & full info coming next week.

This conference looks incredible. Major FOMO.

ISEC 2027 is going to be starting strong!

New special feature!🌍🧪

Here, our guest editors research at the cutting edge of the AI–ecology interface, focusing on work that advances the state of both fields beyond proof-of-concept to true interdisciplinary insight.

Read the full collection👇️

buff.ly/GbMxxmW

LISTEN: Dr. Marie Auger-Methe talks to @cbcquirks about the state of Canadian #polarbears. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jan-31-polar-bears-thrive-9.7068518 Image by Monica Max West/Pixabay

LISTEN: Dr. Marie Auger-Methe talks to @CBC's Quirks & Quarks about the state of Canadian #polarbears.
www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...

Species distribution modeling with expert elicitation and Bayesian calibration Species distribution models (SDM) are key tools in ecology, conservation, and natural resources management. They are traditionally trained with data on direct species observations. However, if collec....

Ever wondered how to use supra-Bayesian approach in species distribution modeling (SMDs). Well we present a framework for it and exemplify it with real data on fish reproduction area estimation.

nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
1/3

StanCon 20206 International Conferene on Bayesian Inference and Probabilistic Programming 17-21 August, 2026 Uppsala, Sweden

Three weeks time to submit contributed talk abstract to StanCon 2026! You can also submit a poster abstract early, if you need to make early travel plans. There will be travel and accommodation support for students, too!

More information about submitting at www.stancon2026.org/abstracts/

#EnviBayes are pleased to have teamed up with LACSC, TIES, and ENVR to co-organise the International Conference on Statistics, Data Science, and Computing for the Environment and Climate Change: 07 Dec 2026 - 11 Dec 2026 at UNAM, Mexico City. See website for details:

isi-web.org/event-detail...

The Greening of Religion Hypothesis posits that faith communities are in a process of transformation to become environmentally responsible. This project introduces a data science-driven framework to systematically measure such action across thousands of places of worship. $100,00 DATA SCIENCES INSTITUTE (DSI) CATALYST GRANT Meredith Franklin. Tanhum Yoreh. Vianey Leos Barajas A DATA SCIENCE FRAMEWORK FOR QUANTIFYING ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION IN FAITH COMMUNITIES

The most unexpected collaboration thus far in my career but it’s fun. We just got a grant to work on:

“A data science framework for quantifying environmental action in faith communities”

**Part 1: From Bayesian inference to Bayesian workflow** 1. Bayesian theory and Bayesian practice 2. Statistical modeling and workflow 3. Computational tools 4. Introduction to workflow: Modeling performance on a multiple choice exam **Part 2: Statistical workflow** 5. Building statistical models 6. Using simulations to capture uncertainty 7. Prediction, generalization, and causal inference 8. Visualizing and checking fitted models 9. Comparing and improving models 10. Statistical inference and scientific inference **Part 3: Computational workflow** 11. Fitting statistical models 12. Diagnosing and fixing problems with fitting 13. Approximate algorithms and approximate models 14. Simulation-based calibration checking 15. Statistical modeling as software development

**4. Case studies** 16. Coding a series of models: Simulated data of movie ratings 17. Prior specification for regression models: Reanalysis of a sleep study 18. Predictive model checking and comparison: Clinical trial 19. Building up to a hierarchical model: Coronavirus testing 20. Using a fitted model for decision analysis: Mixture model for time series competition 21. Posterior predictive checking: Stochastic learning in dogs 22. Incremental development and testing: Black cat adoptions 23. Debugging a model: World Cup football 24. Leave-one-out cross validation model checking and comparison: Roaches 25. Model building and expansion: Golf putting 26. Model building with latent variables: Markov models for animal movement 27. Model building: Time-series decomposition for birthdays 28. Models for regression coefficients and variable selection: Student grades 29. Sampling problems with latent variables: No vehicles in the park 30. Challenge of multimodality: Differential equation for planetary motion 31. Simulation-based calibration checking in model development workflow **Appendices** A. Statistical and computational workflow for Bayesians and non-Bayesians B. How to get the most out of Bayesian Data Analysis

Bayesian Workflow by
Andrew Gelman, Aki Vehtari, @rmcelreath.bsky.social with @danpsimpson.bsky.social, @charlesm993.bsky.social, @yulingy.bsky.social, Lauren Kennedy, Jonah Gabry, @paulbuerkner.com, @modrakm.bsky.social, @vianeylb.bsky.social

(in production, estimated copy-editing time 6 weeks)

A hex sticker with a text that reads Hello Data Science with green, yellow and pink scatterplot points in the background. There is a web address www.hellodata.science

📖 Big news! We just released the first five chapters of our new book, Hello Data Science. It is a fully open-access resource written for beginners. Please help us spread the word! A few points about the book are below 👇

🔗 www.hellodata.science

#rstats #datascience #tidyverse

Extinction risk and the spatial patterning of shark, ray and chimaera richness, including hotspots of coastal and deepwater richness, for wide-ranging and endemic species.

Sharks & rays are sentinels of ocean health.

- Global abundance has been fished down by 65%,
- Now 37.5% of species are threatened,
- The current extinction rate is 25–250 times greater than the background fossil record, with greatest losses in tropical coastal seas. #BiodiversityTargets

StanCon 2026 Deadline for tutorial and workshop in one week Hi everyone, The submission deadline for contributing tutorials and workshops is one week from now, on the 28th of January. Tutorial Tutorials provide hands-on learning experiences to help attendee...

StanCon 2026 tutorial and workshop deadlines in one week:
discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stancon-20...
@mc-stan.org

StanCon 2026 registration and abstract submission is now open Hi everyone! Registration for StanCon 2026 in Uppsala, Sweden, is now open! You can already register and submit abstracts for contributions. Our first keynote speaker will be announced soon. New thi...

StanCon 2026 registration and abstract submission is now open!
Please spread the word!

discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stancon-20...

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom ...

Reminder to join us next Monday, January 12, at noon US ET.

We are co-hosting the Statistical Methods webinar series with the @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social to hear from Dr. Michael Dumelle about “Building Spatial Statistical Models in R using {spmodel}”.

Register at: bit.ly/4i7l0BD

If we wanted to build an ML model to classify the images, how could we integrate other information? And when would it make a difference?

Anyway, hopefully it gets accepted somewhere and we can release it then. Or maybe I'll put the pdf on my website at some point soon. It was fun to learn!

This came from a related problem she's working on in collaboration with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.

We have images of zooplankton from a flow cytometer, but we also have sizes, location where they were sampled, and other ecological knowledge about the species.

Today I learned...arXiv and biorxiv don't accept review papers!

My postdoc Sofia Ruiz Suarez put together a great review paper that covers approaches to integrate ecological domain knowledge in machine learning (focus on neural network) models.

Title: "Informed machine learning in ecology"

OR some story that I’d remember them by. Like,

“You might remember I was the student that measured PM2.5 by the dead raccoon on campus”

Ah yes, I remember you now Julian.

(name changed but true story)

A bit awkward to ask for, so I never have, but when I receive requests to write LoR for students from past courses, I would love to ask them to send a photo.

I almost never remember names, but faces I generally do.