Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Annual meeting held at OARDC, Wooster, Ohio on July 21-22, 2008 Official Members Present: Bert Bishop (OH), John Boyer (KS, Admin), Don Bullock (IL), Mary Christman (FL), Bruce Craig (IN), Sara Duke (USDA-ARS), Susan Durham (UT), George Fernandez (NV), Ed Gbur (AR), Ken Koehler (IA), Larry Madden (OH), Kevin McCarter (LA), David Meek (USDA-ARS), Rob Tempelman (MI), Mark West (USDA-ARS), Jun Zhu (WI) Official Members Absent: Rich Alldredge (WA), Ted Bailey (IA), German Bollero (IL), Paul Cornelius (KY), Mark Hinds (Pioneer Hi-Bred), George Milliken (KS), Bahram Momen (MD), Margaret Nemeth (Monsanto), Cuirong Ren (SD), Dan Schmoldt (UDSA-CREES, Admin.), Bahman Shafii (ID), Linda Young (FL), Hao Zhang (IN) Other Participants: John Aleong, Kevin Armstrong, Larry Douglass, John Stevens, Kathy Yeater 2008 Officers: Ed Gbur, Chair; Kevin McCarter, Program Chair; Bert Bishop and Larry Madden, Local Arrangements Co-chairs; Susan Durham, Secretary NCCC-170 Website: http://www.uark.edu/misc/ncr170/ Technical program: The meeting began at 9:00 am on Monday, July 21, 2008, with opening remarks by Dave Benfield, OARDC Associate Director. The technical program consisted of the following presentations. Group discussion followed each presentation. John Stevens. Recent software tools for preprocessing mass spectrometry data. Bruce Craig. Introduction to partial least squares. Mark West. Evaluating PROC GLIMMIX for fitting a binomial model with random effects: Transformation and power issues. Rob Tempelman. Power analysis for research conducted at commercial dairy farms. Mary Christman. Estimating total Abundance (N) in depletion experiments. George Fernandez. User-friendly statistical analyses using SAS Enterprise Guide. Business meeting: The business meeting began at 9:10 am on Tuesday, July 22, 2008. Ed Gbur presided. Kevin McCarter, Bert Bishop and Larry Madden were thanked for organizing a productive and enjoyable meeting. Ed noted that Bert is retiring and that the group will miss his participation but that he should follow the example set by Larry Douglass and feel free to attend future meetings. The following items were discussed: (1) The status of the reorganization of the USDA is largely unknown. (2) The group considered whether or not to make the technical presentations available to participants and, if so, in what form (i.e., emailed directly to participants or posted to the NCCC-170 website). Security limiting public availability for material available on the website is a concern. It was decided to add a password protected page to the project website to which speakers could voluntarily submit their presentations. (3) Photos taken during the meeting will be posted on the website unless speakers notify Ed otherwise. (4) The 2009 meeting will be held in College Station, TX, at the USDA facility and hosted by Sara Duke. The date is tentatively set for sometime during the week of July 20-24. Sara will check on the availability of the facility. Mary Christman volunteered to serve as program chair. (5) Possible locations were discussed for the 2010 meeting. Rich Alldredge tentatively agreed to host the meeting in Washington. Meeting dates would be coordinated with the Joint Statistics Meetings in Vancouver. (6) The annual report is due shortly after the annual meeting. Participants need to send Ed (egbur@uark.edu) accountings of all activities (workshops, papers, presentations, teaching related, etc.) from October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008 (or since last years report) that are related to or inspired by their participation in NCCC-170 as soon as possible. (7) This years annual report will serve as a summary of activities for the past three years for the projects mid-term review. The group reviewed last year's report and determined appropriate revisions of the review. Specific Goals (1), (3), (4), and (5) are ongoing. Goal (2) has been accomplished and no further work is needed. The series of papers on transitions from general linear models (GLM and MIXED procedures in SAS) to generalized linear models (GLIMMIX procedure in SAS) which are currently in development for submission to a peer-reviewed journal (e.g., Agronomy Journal) will be added to Specific Goals. For the Impact Nugget document, an item will be added to reflect the efforts of project members in organizing a Biometry Section in the Agronomy Society. Under Impacts, self-training (broadening expertise) will be added as a third point. Under Research Needs, the second bullet will be deleted, and an item addressing emerging technologies (e.g., precision agriculture, various "omics" research) will be added, as will an item addressing the development of software tools in conjunction with the paper series. Ed will draft the mid-term report and send it to group members for review. He will need quick turnaround. (8) The deadline for drafts of papers for Agronomy Journal is November 15, 2008. Drafts will be sent to group members with the understanding that they are not to be distributed outside the group and that comments will be needed quickly. Reviewers should consider overlap and consistency of level among the papers. The group thanked Ed for his leadership and, especially, report preparation. Announcements: (1) Mary Christman reminded the group about the Workshop on Environmetrics to be held October 22-24, 2008, at NCAR, Boulder, CO (http://www.stat.purdue.edu/envr/). (2) Larry Madden distributed a position announcement for Berts replacement at OARDC. The meeting adjourned at approximately 10:30 am.

Accomplishments: Statisticians who consult and do research in an Agricultural Experiment Station environment enable land grant institutions to perform their agricultural research missions more effectively and efficiently than would otherwise be possible. However, most stations have at most one or two professional statisticians who are not, and can not be expected to be, experts in every area of statistics. This multi-state committee brings together statisticians to work cooperatively to determine the best current approaches to common statistical problems and to help guide future directions of sound statistical practice. In addition to group outputs such as workshops, it serves as a resource for its members and a sounding board for new ideas in their applied statistical research. As a result, all members are able to provide more effective assistance to agricultural researchers addressing national research priorities than they would without NCCC-170. Outputs: Workshops: Rob Tempelman, Bruce Craig, Larry Douglass and Nora Bello presented a one and a half day mixed model workshop in July, 2008 at the Joint American Dairy Science Association and American Society of Animal Science Meetings in Indianapolis. There were 100 registrants, which again was the maximum possible enrollment. This workshop has been presented a number of times at these meetings and has been updated to reflect current practice. Mary Christman presented a two hour workshop entitled "Too many zeroes? Methods for analyzing zero-inflated datasets" to the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University in December, 2007. Mary Christman and Linda Young gave a full day workshop entitled "Statistical spatial data analysis for GIS" at The Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in January, 2008 in St. Petersburg. Rob Tempelman presented an invited paper entitled "Inferential statistical analysis of microarray experiments" at the International Microarray Workshop at the University of Arizona in January, 2008. Rob Tempelman presented two invited half-day workshops entitled "Mixed model analysis of research data" (November, 2007) and "Design and analysis of gene expression studies using microarrays" (May, 2008) for CSTAT (The Center for Statistical Consulting and Training) at Michigan State University. Jun Zhu presented a workshop entitled "Introduction to spatial statistics using R" at the Program for Interdisciplinary Mathematics, Ecology, and Statistics at Colorado State University, November, 2007. Sara Duke and Kathy Yeater presented a workshop entitled "There's gotta be a better way to design this experiment!" in February, 2008 at the 32nd Rice Technical Working Group Meeting in San Diego. George Fernandez presented a series of three day workshops in Reno entitled "Exploratory graphical analysis and predictive modeling" (April, 2008), "Introduction to SAS programming" (May, 2008) and "Statistical analyses of experimental data" (August, 2008). Presentations: Jun Zhu organized a topic contributed session entitled "Generalized linear mixed effects models with applications in biometry" in August, 2008 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver. NCCC-170 members participating in the session were: Linda Young (with R. H. Zimmerman). Modeling mosquito abundance in Thailand using GLMMs. Kevin McCarter (with Y. Qi). Analysis of hatch data in poultry science: Moving from the arcsine square root transformation to generalized linear mixed modeling with SAS PROC GLIMMIX. Bruce Craig. Modeling the regeneration of grass in golfing divots using GLMMs. Jun Zhu (with Y. Zheng and B. Aukema). Spatial-temporal generalized linear mixed models. Mary Christman gave an invited presentation on "Modeling non-linear mixture experiments" in December, 2007 at the Department of Statistics, Michigan State University. Mary Christman gave an invited presentation entitled "Modeling mixtures of three states of a count process: Application to estimating species richness" in August, 2008 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver. Mary Christman coauthored an invited presentation with T. Bohrmann on "A demographic population model of Chesapeake Bay oysters to evaluate potential management and restoration strategies" in August, 2008 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver. John Stevens gave an invited presentation entitled "Statistical issues in gene expression analysis" to participants in the Gene Expression and Microarray Analysis Training Program hosted by the Center for Integrated Biosystems at Utah State University in June, 2008. Rob Tempelman gave an invited paper entitled "Utilizing appropriate statistical designs and techniques for data collected from commercial dairies" in July, 2008 at the Joint American Dairy Science Association and American Society of Animal Science Meetings in Indianapolis. John Stevens coauthored two selected presentations in April, 2008 at the Kansas State Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture entitled "Statistical issues in the normalization of multi-species microarray data" with B. Ganesan, P. Desai, S. Rajan, and B. Weimer and "Probe-level statistical models for differential expression of genes in bovine NT studies" with J. Bell. Mary Christman gave a talk on "Spatially-explicit stochastic modeling of oyster population dynamics in Chesapeake Bay, USA" at the International Statistical Ecology Conference in July, 2008 at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. John Aleong presented two contributed papers entitled "Modeling of strategic planning related to land use" (coauthor C. Aleong) and "The generalized linear model with spatial variation and multiple covariates" in August, 2008 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver. John Aleong coauthored a presentation with C. Aleong entitled "Are summer institutes funded by FHWA and state Departments of Transportation effective? Case studies of evaluation and learning strategies" in January, 2008 at the Transportation Research Board Conference in Washington, D.C. David Meek gave a presentation entitled "Concordance correlation for model performance assessment. An example with reference evapotranspiration observations" in November, 2007 at the American Society of Agronomy Meetings in New Orleans. David Meek gave two presentations entitled "Graphs to aid in spectral analysis" and "Graphs to aid in concordance analysis" in the Data Visualization and Graphics Section at the Mid-West SAS Users Group Annual Conference in Des Moines in October, 2007. Mary Christman was a discussant for a session entitled "The role of statisticians in understanding climate change" at the 2008 Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver. John Stevens made a presentation entitled "Probe-level statistical models for differential expression of genes in bovine NT studies" to the annual meeting of the W-1112 Multi-State Research Project, Reproductive Performance in Domestic Ruminants, in Laramie WY, in June, 2008. George Fernandez made two presentations in the CRDA Seminar series entitled "A gentle introduction to SAS software" (February, 2008) and "Getting started with the point and click SAS® Enterprise Guide® : An introductory tutorial" (March, 2008) at the University of Nevada, Reno. Other project related activities: John Stevens received funding from the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station to continue a project entitled "Probe-Level Statistical Models for Differential Expression of Genes in Bovine NT Studies." This is in association with the W-1112 Multi-State Research Project "Reproductive Performance in Domestic Ruminants." The $18,500 award is for the period October, 2008 through September, 2009. John Aleong was a member of a group headed by L.A. Dupigny-Giroux who received a grant entitled "Satellites, weather and climate (SWAC) - Contributing to geospatial climate education and literacy" from the National Science Foundation. The $149, 997 award is for 2008 through 2010. Specific goals for the next three years: (1) Educate project members in statistical issues and methodology related to statistical problems in which large number of variables are collected on relatively few experimental units. Application areas include biotechnology, precision agriculture and chemometrics. (2) Continue to develop methodology to address both spatial and general statistical problems in the area of precision agriculture. (3) Revise the mixed model workshop to include generalized linear mixed models and the use of new software. (4) Offer the mixed model workshop upon request from subject matter groups. (5) Publish a series of papers targeted to agricultural scientists on transitioning from general linear models (GLM and MIXED procedures in SAS) to generalized linear models (GLIMMIX procedure in SAS). Summary of 2006-2008 activities (for mid-term review): NCCC-170 has produced workshops on mixed models and spatial statistics specifically targeted at researchers in the agricultural, environmental and natural resources sciences. Both workshops have been presented multiple times at national meetings of subject matter societies with much success as judged by attendance levels and feedback from participants. These and workshops on related topics have been presented at regional, local and stand alone meetings a total of 21 times in the last three years. USDA-ARS statisticians at Beltsville organized and co-hosted a two day spatial statistics workshop with USGS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in March, 2006. The impetus for the workshop came in part from the interaction between NCCC-170 and the ARS statisticians, some of whom are project members. In addition, four of the 15 presentations were authored project members. Several members of NCCC-170 have been instrumental in the recent development of a new Biometry Division within the American Society of Agronomy. During the last three years, NCCC-170 members reported that they have authored or coauthored 75 publications and two technical reports and have made 49 presentations (of which 19 were invited) which were connected in some way to their participation in this project. In the academic area, project participation has led to the development of one new course and the updating of material in many others in members home institutions.

Aleong, C. and J. Aleong (2008). Are summer institutes funded by FHWA and state Departments of Transportation effective? College Teaching Methods & Styles Journal 4(5), 41-49. Aleong, C. and J. Aleong John (2007). Evaluation and accountability of programs matter: Case studies of evaluation and learning strategies. ASA Proceedings of the Joint Statistical Meetings, 2221-2228. Bennett, K.E., M.A. Stuart, J.E. Hopper, M.S. West, and B.S. Drolet (2008). Blood feeding behavior of vesicular stomatitis virus infected culicoides sonorensis (DipteraCeratopogonidae). In press. Breazeale, D., G. Fernandez and R. Narayanan (2008). Modeling pollination factors that influence alfalfa seed yield in North-Central Nevada. Journal of Central European Agriculture 9(1), 107-115. Burgueno, J., J. Crossa, P.L. Cornelius and R-C. Yang (2008). Using factor analytic models for joining environments and genotypes without crossover genotype x environment interaction. Crop Science 48, 1291-1305. Christman, M. C. (2008). Statistical modeling of observational data with spatial dependencies. Journal of Wildlife Management 72(1), 2333. Christman, M. C. (2008). Sampling of rare populations. In Handbook of Statistics No. 29, Sample Surveys: Theory, Methods and Inference. Danny Pfefferman and C. R. Rao (ed.) Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gharibvand, L. and G. Fernandez (2007). Survival analysis plots using SAS ® ODS graphics. Proceedings of the 2007 Western SAS Users Group Conference. Gharibvand, L. and G. Fernandez (2008). Advanced statistical and graphical features of SAS® PHREG. Proceedings of the 2008 SAS GLOBAL Forum. Online paper 375-2008. Gustin, M.S., M. Xin, J. Ericksen and G. Fernandez (2008). Determination of the potential for release of mercury from combustion product amended soils: Part 1Simulations of beneficial use. Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association 58(5), 673-683. Guttormsen J., M.I. Koster, J.R. Stevens, D. Roop, T. Williams, and Q.A. Winger (2008). Disruption of epidermal specific gene expression and delayed skin development in AP-2gamma mutant mice. Developmental Biology 317, 187-195. Knapp, S. and B. A. Craig (2008). Incorporating genotyping error into non-invasive DNA-based mark-recapture population estimates. Journal of Wildlife Management. In press. Kulmatiski A., K.H. Beard, J.R. Stevens, and S.M. Cobbold (2008). Plant-soil feedbacks: A meta-analytical review. Ecology Letters 11, 980-992. Jarecki, M.K., T.B. Parkin, A.S. Chan, J.L. Hatfield, D.W. Meek, and R. Jones (2008). Greenhouse gases emission from two soils under N fertilizer and swine slurry. Journal of Environmental Quality 37, 1432-1438. Malone, R.W., L. Ma, D.L. Karlen, T.G. Meade, D.W. Meek, P. Heilman, R.S. Kanwar, and J.L. Hatfield (2007). Empirical analysis and prediction of nitrate loading and crop yield for corn-soybean rotations. Geoderma 140, 223-234. Meek, D., J. Prueger, M. Tomer, and R. Malone (2008). Spectral procedures enhance the analysis of three agricultural time series. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture, J. Boyer (ed.). Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University Department of Statistics. 154-170. Meek, D. (2007). A macro for producing graphs used in assessing a spectrum. In Data Visualization and Graphics Section (Paper D2), MidWest SAS Users Group Annual Conference Proceedings, A. Katschke (ed.). Cary, NC: SAS Inst. Inc., Cary, NC. 6 pp. Meek, D. (2007). Two macros for producing graphs to assess agreement between two variables. In Data Visualization and Graphics Section (Paper D6), MidWest SAS Users Group Annual Conference Proceedings, A. Katschke (ed.). Cary, NC: SAS Inst. Inc., Cary, NC. 5 pp Ristic, Z., U. Bukovnik, P. Prasad, and M.S. West (2008). A model for prediction of heat stability of photosynthetic membranes. Crop Science 48, 1513-1522. Sigman-Grant, M. , E. Christiansen, G. Fernandez, J. Fletcher, S. L. Johnson, L. J. Branen and B. Price (2008). Hungry Mondays: Low-income children. Childcare Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition 2(4), 19  38. Singer, J.W., S.D. Logsdon, and D.W. Meek (2008). Soybean growth and seed yield response to tillage and compost. Agronomy Journal 100, 1039-1046. Steibel, J.P., G.J.M. Rosa, and R.J. Tempelman (2008). Optimizing two-stage experiments for transcriptional profiling. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (in press). doi 10.1016/j.csda.2008.03.032 Tempelman, R.J. (2008). Statistical analysis of efficient unbalanced two color microarray experiments. International Journal of Plant Genomics Vol. 2008, Article ID 584360, 16 pages. doi 10.1155/2008/584360. Zhu, J., J.G. Rasmussen, J. Moller, B.H. Aukema, and K.F. Raffa (2008). Spatial-temporal modeling of forest gaps generated by colonization from below- and above-ground bark beetle species. Journal of the American Statistical Association 103, 162-177. Zhu, J., Y. Zheng, A.L. Carroll, and B.H. Aukema (2008). Autologistic regression analysis of spatial-temporal binary data via Monte Carlo maximum likelihood. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics 13, 84-98.