Department seminar by Sylvia Esterby, University of British Columbia Okanagan

Water quality monitoring and assessment: a statistical perspective

The assessment of status and the detection and estimation of change are two fundamental issues which drive the development of environmental monitoring programs and the analysis of environmental data. Several challenges relevant to the analysis of existing water quality data and the design of new monitoring programs will be discussed. What appears to be abundant data can be information poor due to spatial and temporal heterogeneity and the nature of and number of variables. Large-p-small-n data sets provide poor spatial-temporal characterization. Toxic contaminant data include large numbers of non-detects. Real time monitoring generates questions of appropriate signal capture and online quality control. Several specific water quality case studies will be considered. A statistical framework will be proposed and the statistical analyses or methods which have been used will be discussed, sometimes from a historical perspective and other times by reviewing current research directions.