Profile

Dr Tiago Marques
Research Fellow

Extending distance sampling under situations for which the conventional methods do not hold, namely in the presence of measurement error and non uniform distribution of animals with respect to samplers. Estimating cetacean abundance using passive acoustic data.

Research Overview:

I am currently working in the area of Ecological Statistics, being a Senior Research Fellow in CREEM (University of St Andrews, UK) and an invited professor in DEIO (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal). A biologist by training, started working with freshwater fish, but the intense and constant questions about survey design and data analysis led me to an MSc and a PhD in statistics. The PhD was about extending distance sampling methods to account for measurement error in distances and animal density gradients. From 2007 till 2010 I worked full time for DECAF, a project aimed at estimating cetacean abundance and density using passive acoustic data. From 2010 to 2015 I worked full time on LATTE, a project aimed at integrating information about cetacean behaviour and movement collected at various spatial and temporal scales to predict the effect of human made noise like SONAR on cetaceans. Since 2015 I have been working on a large number of different projects, generally involving density estimation from passive acoustic data. Over the years I have worked mostly with cetaceans, but have done work with fish, both freshwater and marine, ungulates, birds, primates, carnivores, marsupials and even plants. I have the polar bear as a "pet" species, having designed, implemented and analysed data from 2004 and 2015 surveys of the Barents Sea polar bear sub-population, and having helped in the design of a couple of additional polar bear surveys in other areas of the high Artic. I have a wider interest in the adequate use of statistics in ecology and the dissemination of statistics to a wider public in general.