EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-07-02DOI: 10.1002/env.2869
Rosa M. Di Biase, Marzia Marcheselli, Caterina Pisani
{"title":"Achieving spatial balance in environmental surveys under constant inclusion probabilities or inclusion density functions","authors":"Rosa M. Di Biase, Marzia Marcheselli, Caterina Pisani","doi":"10.1002/env.2869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2869","url":null,"abstract":"In environmental and ecological surveys, well spread samples can be easily obtained via widely adopted tessellation schemes, which yield equal first‐order inclusion probabilities in the case of finite populations of areas or constant inclusion density functions in the case of continuous populations. In the literature, many alternative schemes that are explicitly tailored to select well spread samples have been proposed, but owing to their complexity, their use should be preferred only if they allow us to achieve a valuable gain in precision with respect to the tessellation schemes. Therefore, by means of an extensive simulation study, the performances of tessellation schemes and several specifically tailored schemes are compared under constant first‐order inclusion probabilities or constant inclusion density functions.","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141515684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Categorical data analysis using discretization of continuous variables to investigate associations in marine ecosystems","authors":"Hiroko Kato Solvang, Shinpei Imori, Martin Biuw, Ulf Lindstrøm, Tore Haug","doi":"10.1002/env.2867","DOIUrl":"10.1002/env.2867","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Understanding and predicting interactions between predators and prey and their environment are fundamental for understanding food web structure, dynamics, and ecosystem function in both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Thus, estimating the conditional associations between species and their environments is important for exploring connections or cooperative links in the ecosystem, which in turn can help to clarify such directional relationships. For this purpose, a relevant and practical statistical method is required to link presence/absence observations with biomass, abundance, and physical quantities obtained as continuous real values. These data are sometimes sparse in oceanic space and too short as time series data. To meet this challenge, we provide an approach based on applying categorical data analysis to present/absent observations and real-number data. The real-number data used as explanatory variables for the present/absent response variable are discretized based on the optimal detection of thresholds without any prior biological/ecological information. These discretized data express two different levels, such as large/small or high/low, which give experts a simple interpretation for investigating complicated associations in marine ecosystems. This approach is implemented in the previous statistical method called CATDAP developed by Sakamoto and Akaike in 1979. Our proposed approach consists of a two-step procedure for categorical data analysis: (1) finding the appropriate threshold to discretize the real-number data for applying an independent test; and (2) identifying the best conditional probability model to investigate the possible associations among the data based on a statistical information criterion. We perform a simulation study to validate our proposed approach and investigate whether the method's observation includes many zeros (zero-inflated data), which can often occur in practical situations. Furthermore, the approach is applied to two datasets: (1) one collected during an international synoptic krill survey in the Scotia Sea west of the Antarctic Peninsula to investigate associations among krill, fin whale (<i>Balaenoptera physalus</i>), surface temperature, depth, slope in depth (flatter or steeper terrain), and temperature gradient (slope in temperature); (2) the other collected by ecosystem surveys conducted during August–September in 2014–2017 to investigate associations among common minke whales, the predatory fish Atlantic cod, and their main prey groups (zooplankton, 0-group fish) in Arctic Ocean waters to the west and north of Svalbard, Norway. The R code summarizing our proposed numerical procedure is presented in S4S1.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/env.2867","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141501054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-06-28DOI: 10.1002/env.2874
Marnie I. Low, Adrian W. Bowman, Wayne Jones, Matthijs Bonte
{"title":"Exact optimisation of spatiotemporal monitoring networks by p-splines with applications in groundwater assessment","authors":"Marnie I. Low, Adrian W. Bowman, Wayne Jones, Matthijs Bonte","doi":"10.1002/env.2874","DOIUrl":"10.1002/env.2874","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper develops methods to optimise the sampling strategy for monitoring networks which have fixed locations with regular sampling but with only a proportion of these locations to be used on each sampling occasion. This creates the need for a dynamic spatiotemporal sampling design which makes optimal choices of the locations to be sampled on each occasion. This is a commonly occurring scenario in many environmental settings where there is an existing network of monitoring stations and sampling can be expensive. The particular context of optimisation of an existing groundwater monitoring network is discussed in the paper. The standard design criteria of integrated variance (IV) and variance of the integral (VI) are adapted to the spatiotemporal setting. <span>p</span>-spline models are shown to allow exact computation of IV and VI, in the case of the additive errors, and a very good approximation of IV in the case of multiplicative errors. The speed of these exact computations allows the globally optimal sampling design to be identified efficiently. In the standard case of additive errors, the design criteria are able to exploit information across time. The only information needed is the location of sampling points, not the values sampled. This contrasts with the case of multiplicative errors where the design criteria are also influenced by the observed response data. Simulated and real examples are used to illustrate the results throughout.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/env.2874","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141501055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-06-26DOI: 10.1002/env.2875
Roberto Ambrosini, Federica Baccini, Lucio Barabesi
{"title":"Similarity network aggregation for the analysis of glacier ecosystems","authors":"Roberto Ambrosini, Federica Baccini, Lucio Barabesi","doi":"10.1002/env.2875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2875","url":null,"abstract":"The synthesis of information deriving from complex networks is a topic receiving increasing relevance in ecology and environmental sciences. In particular, the aggregation of multilayer networks, that is, network structures formed by multiple interacting networks (the layers), constitutes a fast‐growing field. In several environmental applications, the layers of a multilayer network are modeled as a collection of similarity matrices describing how similar pairs of biological entities are, based on different types of features (e.g., biological traits). The present paper first discusses two main techniques for combining the multi‐layered information into a single network (the so‐called monoplex), that is, similarity network fusion and similarity matrix average (SMA). Then, the effectiveness of the two methods is tested on a real‐world dataset of the relative abundance of microbial species in the ecosystems of nine glaciers (four glaciers in the Alps and five in the Andes). A preliminary clustering analysis on the monoplexes obtained with different methods shows the emergence of a tightly connected community formed by species that are typical of cryoconite holes worldwide. Moreover, the weights assigned to different layers by the SMA algorithm suggest that two large South American glaciers (Exploradores and Perito Moreno) are structurally different from the smaller glaciers in both Europe and South America. Overall, these results highlight the importance of integration methods in the discovery of the underlying organizational structure of biological entities in multilayer ecological networks.","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141501056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-06-21DOI: 10.1002/env.2868
Sihan Chen, Sameh Abdulah, Ying Sun, Marc G. Genton
{"title":"On the impact of spatial covariance matrix ordering on tile low-rank estimation of Matérn parameters","authors":"Sihan Chen, Sameh Abdulah, Ying Sun, Marc G. Genton","doi":"10.1002/env.2868","DOIUrl":"10.1002/env.2868","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Spatial statistical modeling involves processing an <span></span><math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <mi>n</mi>\u0000 <mo>×</mo>\u0000 <mi>n</mi>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation>$$ ntimes n $$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> symmetric positive definite covariance matrix, where <span></span><math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <mi>n</mi>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation>$$ n $$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> denotes the number of locations. However, when <span></span><math>\u0000 <semantics>\u0000 <mrow>\u0000 <mi>n</mi>\u0000 </mrow>\u0000 <annotation>$$ n $$</annotation>\u0000 </semantics></math> is large, processing this covariance matrix using traditional methods becomes prohibitive. Thus, coupling parallel processing with approximation can be an elegant solution by relying on parallel solvers that deal with the matrix as a set of small tiles instead of the full structure. The approximation can also be performed at the tile level for better compression and faster execution. The tile low-rank (TLR) approximation has recently been used to compress the covariance matrix, which mainly relies on ordering the matrix elements, which can impact the compression quality and the efficiency of the underlying solvers. This work investigates the accuracy and performance of location-based ordering algorithms. We highlight the pros and cons of each ordering algorithm and give practitioners hints on carefully choosing the ordering algorithm for TLR approximation. We assess the quality of the compression and the accuracy of the statistical parameter estimates of the Matérn covariance function using TLR approximation under various ordering algorithms and settings of correlations through simulations on irregular grids. Our conclusions are supported by an application to daily soil moisture data in the Mississippi Basin area.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/env.2868","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141515685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-06-21DOI: 10.1002/env.2871
Said Obakrim, Pierre Ailliot, Valérie Monbet, Nicolas Raillard
{"title":"EM algorithm for generalized Ridge regression with spatial covariates","authors":"Said Obakrim, Pierre Ailliot, Valérie Monbet, Nicolas Raillard","doi":"10.1002/env.2871","DOIUrl":"10.1002/env.2871","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The generalized Ridge penalty is a powerful tool for dealing with multicollinearity and high-dimensionality in regression problems. The generalized Ridge regression can be derived as the mean of a posterior distribution with a Normal prior and a given covariance matrix. The covariance matrix controls the structure of the coefficients, which depends on the particular application. For example, it is appropriate to assume that the coefficients have a spatial structure when the covariates are spatially correlated. This study proposes an Expectation-Maximization algorithm for estimating generalized Ridge parameters whose covariance structure depends on specific parameters. We focus on three cases: diagonal (when the covariance matrix is diagonal with constant elements), Matérn, and conditional autoregressive covariances. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and then the method is applied to predict ocean wave heights using wind conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141501098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-06-18DOI: 10.1002/env.2866
Matteo Fontana, Massimo Tavoni, Simone Vantini
{"title":"Global sensitivity and domain-selective testing for functional-valued responses: An application to climate economy models","authors":"Matteo Fontana, Massimo Tavoni, Simone Vantini","doi":"10.1002/env.2866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2866","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Understanding the dynamics and evolution of climate change and associated uncertainties is key for designing robust policy actions. Computer models are key tools in this scientific effort, which have now reached a high level of sophistication and complexity. Model auditing is needed in order to better understand their results, and to deal with the fact that such models are increasingly opaque with respect to their inner workings. Current techniques such as Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) are limited to dealing either with multivariate outputs, stochastic ones, or finite-change inputs. This limits their applicability to time-varying variables such as future pathways of greenhouse gases. To provide additional semantics in the analysis of a model ensemble, we provide an extension of GSA methodologies tackling the case of stochastic functional outputs with finite change inputs. To deal with finite change inputs and functional outputs, we propose an extension of currently available GSA methodologies while we deal with the stochastic part by introducing a novel, domain-selective inferential technique for sensitivity indices. Our method is explored via a simulation study that shows its robustness and efficacy in detecting sensitivity patterns. We apply it to real-world data, where its capabilities can provide to practitioners and policymakers additional information about the time dynamics of sensitivity patterns, as well as information about robustness.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/env.2866","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142174132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-05-23DOI: 10.1002/env.2855
M. Meis, M. Pirani, C. Euan, S. Castruccio, S. Simmons, J.R. Stroud, M. Blangiardo, C.K. Wikle, M. Wheeler, E. Naumova, L. Bravo, C. Miller, Y. Gel
{"title":"Catalysing virtual collaboration: The experience of the remote TIES working groups","authors":"M. Meis, M. Pirani, C. Euan, S. Castruccio, S. Simmons, J.R. Stroud, M. Blangiardo, C.K. Wikle, M. Wheeler, E. Naumova, L. Bravo, C. Miller, Y. Gel","doi":"10.1002/env.2855","DOIUrl":"10.1002/env.2855","url":null,"abstract":"<p>During the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of collaboration and scientific exchange between members of the scientific community was enhanced by technology. Virtual meetings and work platforms have become common resources to continue generating research, partially replacing instances of joint in-person work before, during or after a conference. The idea of teleworking played a fundamental role in remote collaboration groups within The International Statistical Society (TIES), a community of interdisciplinary scientists such as statisticians, mathematicians, meteorologists, and biologists, among others working on quantitative methods to enhance solutions to environmental problems. In 2021 the Society launched three working groups with the aim of improving networking across the Society's members and develop creative collaboration, while advancing statistical and computational methods motivated by real-world driven applications in environmental research. Here, we provide insights from this virtual collaborative initiative.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141107983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-05-22DOI: 10.1002/env.2854
Mirjana Glisovic-Bensa, Walter W. Piegorsch, Edward J. Bedrick
{"title":"Bayesian benchmark dose risk assessment with mixed-factor quantal data","authors":"Mirjana Glisovic-Bensa, Walter W. Piegorsch, Edward J. Bedrick","doi":"10.1002/env.2854","DOIUrl":"10.1002/env.2854","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Benchmark analysis is a general risk estimation strategy for identifying the benchmark dose (BMD) past which the risk of exhibiting an adverse environmental response exceeds a fixed, target value of benchmark response. Estimation of BMD and of its lower confidence limit (BMDL) is well understood for the case of an adverse response to a single stimulus. In many environmental settings, however, one or more additional, secondary, qualitative factor(s) may collude to affect the adverse outcome, such that the risk changes with differential levels of the secondary factor. Bayesian methods for estimation of the BMD and BMDL have grown in popularity, and a large variety of candidate dose–response models is available for applying these methods. This article applies Bayesian strategies to a mixed-factor setting with a secondary qualitative factor possessing two levels to derive two-factor Bayesian BMDs and BMDLs. We present reparameterized dose–response models that allow for explicit use of prior information on the target parameter of interest, the BMD. We also enhance our Bayesian estimation technique for BMD analysis by applying Bayesian model averaging to produce the BMDs and BMDLs, overcoming associated questions of model adequacy when multimodel uncertainty is present. An example from environmental carcinogenicity testing illustrates the calculations.</p>","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"35 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141113061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EnvironmetricsPub Date : 2024-05-03DOI: 10.1002/env.2852
Adelia Evangelista, Christian Acal, Ana M. Aguilera, Annalina Sarra, Tonio Di Battista, Sergio Palermi
{"title":"High dimensional variable selection through group Lasso for multiple function‐on‐function linear regression: A case study in PM10 monitoring","authors":"Adelia Evangelista, Christian Acal, Ana M. Aguilera, Annalina Sarra, Tonio Di Battista, Sergio Palermi","doi":"10.1002/env.2852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2852","url":null,"abstract":"SummaryAnalyzing the effect of chemical and local meteorological variables over the behaviour in concentrations in the Abruzzo region (Italy), with the objective of forecasting and controlling air quality, motivates the current work. Given that the available data are curves that represent the day‐to‐day variations, a multiple function‐on‐function linear regression (MFFLR) model is considered. By assuming the Karhunen‐Loève expansion, MFFLR model can be reduced to a classical linear regression model for each principal component of the functional response in terms of all principal components (PCs) of the functional predictors. In this sense, a regularization approach for functional principal component regression based on the merge of functional data analysis with group Lasso is proposed. This novel methodology allows to estimate the model and, simultaneously, select those relevant functional predictors with the functional response, where each functional independent variable is represented by a group of input variables derived by the PCs.","PeriodicalId":50512,"journal":{"name":"Environmetrics","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}