Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science researchers Augustine Wigle and Audrey Béliveau have received the 2026 Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA) for their paper, Estimating methane emissions from the upstream oil and gas industry using a multi-stage framework, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A. Wigle conducted the award-winning research as a Statistics PhD student at Waterloo under the supervision of Dr. Béliveau.
The Outstanding Statistical Application Award recognizes exceptional applications of statistics to address important real-world problems. Presented annually, the award honours work that demonstrates both significant impact in a substantive field and ingenuity or novelty in its statistical approach. Recipients are selected based on the impact of their statistical application in addressing a significant problem and the ingenuity of their approach.
Wigle and Béliveau's award-winning paper introduces a multi-stage statistical framework for estimating province-wide methane emissions from the upstream oil and gas industry using aerial survey data. Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases and a major contributor to climate change, making accurate emissions estimates critical for developing effective climate policies and tracking emissions-reduction targets. Developed through a collaboration with the Government of British Columbia, the research provides the first statistically rigorous approach to this problem, offering a method that better supports government and industry decision-making through improved interpretability, computational efficiency, transparency and statistical validity.
“Statistical methods often work behind the scenes, but they play a critical role in helping us understand and address complex challenges,” says Béliveau. “We're proud that this research can contribute to more informed decisions about methane emissions and climate action.”