Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Technical program: The meeting began at 8:30 am on Thursday, July 7, 2011 with opening remarks by Marshall Martin, Associate Director of Agricultural Research Programs, and Bruce Craig. The technical program consisted of the following presentations. Nora Bello Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of heterogeneity in the association between milk production and reproduction in dairy cattle Bryan Pijanowski Studying soundscape dynamics: How 3 TB of acoustic information at a point can be overwhelming to analyze Linda Young Assessing uncertainty in a spatial setting when both Berkson and classical measurement error are present Julia Sharp Statistically inferring protein-protein associations from affinity isolation LC-MS/MS experiments Walt Stroup GLMM: Insights & unfinished business - some reflections from the GLIMMIX book experience Business meeting: The business meeting began at 9:00 am on Friday, July 8, 2011. Ed Gbur presided. Bruce Craig and John Stevens were thanked for organizing a productive and enjoyable meeting. Minutes from the 2010 meeting were approved. Ed invited the speakers to send their presentations for posting on the project web site and all participants to send any photographs taken during the meeting. The following items were discussed: (1) Julia Sharp presented a proposal from SCC-013 (USSES) to meet jointly with them next year at SAS Institute. Their meeting is tentatively scheduled for June 28-29, 2012. The content of the technical program was discussed. It was decided that if the SAS personnel associated with the development of GLIMMIX and their high performance module would give presentations, then NCCC-170 would be in favor of a joint meeting. Julia will find out if SAS is agreeable to this proposal and report back to the group sometime in August. Rob Tempelman agreed to host the 2013 meeting at Michigan State if we met jointly next year with USSES. If we do not meet jointly, the meeting at Michigan State would be held on July 12-13, 2012. Bruce Craig agreed to serve as program chair. (2) Ed Gbur reported that the NCCC-170 was renewed for another five years, beginning October 1, 2011. The project number will be retained under the renewal. Current project members were not automatically rolled over into the renewed project. Anyone who has not filled out a new Appendix E to become an official member is encouraged to do so as soon as possible. (3) The group reviewed and discussed specific goals for the next three years and impact statements. The annual report and impact statement are due shortly after the annual meeting. Participants need to send Ed (egbur@uark.edu) accountings of all activities (workshops, papers, presentations, teaching related items, etc.) from October 1, 2010 to September 30, 2011 (or since last year's report) that are related to or inspired by their participation in NCCC-170 as soon as possible. (4) Ed Gbur reported that the completed generalized linear mixed model monograph manuscript was sent to the Agronomy Society at the end of June. The title is Analysis of Generalized Linear Mixed Models in the Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences. Project members involved in the writing are Mary Christman, Susan Durham, Ed Gbur, Matt Kramer, Kevin McCarter, Walt Stroup, Mark West and Linda Young. Publication is scheduled to coincide with the Society's annual meeting in October. The meeting adjourned at approximately 10:35 a.m. A group photograph for the project web site was taken immediately afterward.

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 producing group outputs such as workshops, the committee 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 be without NCCC-170. Outputs: Workshops: Nora Bello, Bruce Craig and Rob Tempelman presented a "Mixed Model Workshop" at the Joint Annual Meeting of the American Dairy Science Association and the American Association of Animal Science in New Orleans in July 2011 (day and a half workshop). There were 80 registrants. Larry Madden presented a half-day workshop entitled "Mixed Models for Data Analysis in Plant Pathology" at the Annual Meeting of the American Phytopathological Society in Charlotte, NC, in August 2010. Rob Tempelman presented a workshop entitled "Introduction to SAS" for faculty, post-doctoral associates and graduates at Michigan State University, MSU Center for Statistical Consulting and Training (CSTAT) in November 2010. There were 40 participants. Walt Stroup, Mary Christman, and Kevin McCarter presented a one day workshop entitled "The Next Generation of Statistics in our Sciences - Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM); A one-day workshop using SAS PROC GLIMMIX with data examples from the plant and natural resources sciences" at the American Society of Agronomy annual meeting in Long Beach, CA in October 2010. Presentations: Christman, MC. Generalized Linear Mixed Models to Analyze Weekly counts in a Split Plot Design at a symposium entitled "Biometry and Statistical Computing"  at the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA international annual meetings in Long Beach, CA in November 2010 (Invited). Madden, L.V. Contemporary approaches to plant disease forecasting: A case study with Fusarium head blight of wheat at China Agricultural University (CAU) and Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), Beijing (Invited seminars), March 2010. McCarter, K. Using Semi-Parametric Models to Account for Spatial Variability in Developing Variable-Rate Treatment Prescriptions for Applications in Precision Agriculture at a symposium entitled "Biometry and Statistical Computing" at the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA international annual meetings in Long Beach, CA in November 2010 (Invited). Shafii, B., W. J. Price, and S.S. Seefeldt. Estimation techniques for dose-response functions at a symposium at the fifty-first annual meeting of the Weed Science Society of America, February 2011, Portland, OR (Invited). Stevens, J. Making the Most of Missing Data in Dose-Response Modeling (A Story of Beetles Down Under) at the ASA Utah Chapter Annual Meeting in November, 2010 in Salt Lake City (Chapter President's Address). Stevens, J. Statistical Issues in the Normalization of Multi-Species Microarray Data at Myriad Genetics in December, 2010 in Salt Lake City (Invited). Stroup, W.W. From ANOVA to GLM to GLIMMIX: Eighty Years of Statistical Modeling in Agronomic Research at a symposium entitled "Biometry and Statistical Computing"  at the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA international annual meetings in Long Beach, CA in November 2010. (Invited). Yeater, K. and S. Duke. Statistical Considerations for On-Farm Research at a symposium entitled "Developing On-Farm Research and Education Plots" at the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA international annual meetings in Long Beach, CA in November 2010. (Invited). Gbur, E.E. The role of data and statistics in agricultural research at the Non-classified Support Staff Professional Development Workshop (University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture) in Stuttgart, AR in February, 2011. Kramer, M., S.C. Chen, S. Gebauer and D. Baer. Estimating the subject by treatment interaction in non-replicated crossover diet studies at the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver. Kramer, M., S.C. Chen, S. Gebauer and D. Baer. Estimating the subject by treatment interaction in non-replicated crossover diet studies at the Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture in Manhattan, KS, April 2011. Macchiavelli, R. and J. A. Chavarría-Carvajal. Fitting disease progress curves to describe Black Sigatoka (Mycosphaerellafijiensis) epidemics on banana in Puerto Rico at the Joint annual meeting of American Phytopathological Society - Caribbean Division and Entomological Society of America, 2011. Madden, L.V. Data mining of weather and climatic data to improve risk prediction of Fusarium head blight at the National Fusarium Head Blight Forum, December 2010, Milwaukee, WI. Madden, L.V. Contemporary approaches to forecasting Fusarium head blight of wheat: The cost of decision making at a Symposium at University Federal De Vicosa, Brazil, April 2010. Madden, L.V. Meta-Analysis in Plant Pathology at the Plant Disease Epidemiology Conference in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil, October 2010. Madden, L.V. Sampling for Detecting Fungicide Resistance at the Annual Meeting of the American Phytopathological Society, Honolulu, HI, August 2011. Meek, D. Some graphical analysis for time response curves at the Iowa SAS® Users Group annual conference in Des Moines, IA, May 2011. Meek, D. Are eddy covariance series stationary? at the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA international annual meetings in Long Beach, CA in November 2010. Meek, D. Two EDF Graphs for Assessing Agreement between Paired Data at the MidWest SAS® Users Group annual conference in Milwaukee, WI in October 2010. Stevens, J., J. Rounds, and D.I. Schlipalius. Penalized EM in Binomial Models with Missing Categorical Covariates at the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver. West, M. Repeated measures analysis at the USDA-ARS Center for Grain and Animal Health Research, Manhattan, KS, May 2011. Technical Reports: Christman, M. C. and Colee, J. 2011. Statistical Analyses for Status and Trend of Coral Reef Data Collected Between 1996 and 2009 in The Dry Tortugas, Florida Keys and Biscayne Bay. A Report for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Coral Reef Evaluation and Monitoring Project (FKNMS CREMP). 550 pp. Other project related activities: John Stevens received funding from the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station for a project involving statistical methods for next-generation sequencing data. This is in association with the W-1112 Multi-State Research Project "Reproductive Performance in Domestic Ruminants." July 2011 - June 2012. John Stevens (with his co-authors) received the 2010 "Outstanding Paper in Landscape Ecology" award from the U.S. International Association for Landscape Ecology for "A Meta-Analytic Review of Corridor Effectiveness", published in Conservation Biology 24(3):660-668. David Meek served as Chair of the Biometry and Statistical Computing Section of the American Society of Agronomy. Kathy Yeater is Chair-elect of the section.

Bangarwa, S.K., J.K. Norsworthy, E.E. Gbur and J.D. Mattice (2010). Phenyl isothiocyanate performance on purple nutsedge under virtually impermeable film mulch. HortTech, 20, 402-408. Boykin, D., M. Camp, L. Johnson, M. Kramer, D. Meek,. D. Palmquist, B. Vinyard, and M. West (2011). Generalized linear mixed model estimation using Proc GLIMMIX: Results from simulations when the data and model match, and when the model is misspecified. In: W.Song and G.L. Gadbury (eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture, Department of Statistics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS. 137-170. Brando, P. M., Goetz, S., Baccini, A., Nepstad, D. C., Beck, P. S. A., and Christman, M. C. (2010). Seasonal and Interannual Variability of Climate and Vegetation Indices across the Amazon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107, 14685-14690. Brooks, S.A., Anders, M.M., Yeater, K.M. (2010). Effect of furrow irrigation on the severity of false smut in susceptible rice varieties. Plant Disease 94(5):570-574. Brooks, S.A, Anders, M.M., and Yeater, K.M. (2011). Influences from long-term crop rotation, soil tillage and fertility on the severity of rice grain smuts. Plant Disease. In press. Brye, K.R. and E.E. Gbur (2010). Regional differences in soil carbon and nitrogen storage as affected by landuse and soil moisture regime. Soil Science, 175, 339-348. Brye, K.R. and E.E. Gbur (2011). Near-surface soil property changes over time as affected by grassland management in the Ozark Highlands. Soil Science, 176(3), 129-135. Bushman, B. S., Larson, S. R., Tuna, M., West, M. S., Hernandez, A. G., Vullaganti, D., et al. (2011). Orchardgrass (dactylis glomerata L.) EST and SSR marker development, annotation, and transferability. Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 123(1), 119-129. Caesar-TonThat, T., Sainju, U. M., Wright, S. F., Shelver, W. L., Kolberg, R. L., and West, M. (2011). Long-term tillage and cropping effects on microbiological properties associated with aggregation in a semi-arid soil. Biology and Fertility of Soils, 47(2), 157-165. Conles, M., C. Cragnolini, V. Yossen, M. Balzarini, R. Macchiavelli (2011). Estimación de curvas de progreso de la incidencia de podredumbre blanca (Sclerotiumcepivorum) en cultivos de ajo mediante un modelo no lineal mixto. Agriscientiea XXVIII: 61-74 (Estimation of incidence progress curves of white rot (Sclerotiumcepivorum Berk.) in garlic crops using a nonlinear mixed model.) Culver, D. C., Holsinger, J. R., Christman, M. C., Pipan, T. (2010). Morphological Differences Among Eyeless Amphipods in the Genus Stygobromus Dwelling in Different Subterranean Habitats. Journal of Crustacean Biology, 30(1), 68-74. Daigh, A.L., K.R. Brye, A.N. Sharpley and E.E. Gbur (2010). Broiler litter composition as affected by water extractant, dilution ratio and extraction time. Communications in Soil Science and Plant Analysis, 41, 2340-2357. Estevez, I. , Mallapur, A., Miller, C. P., and Christman, M. C. (2010). Short- and long-term movement patterns in complex confined environments in broiler chickens: The effects of distribution of cover panels and food resources. Poultry Science, 89(4), 643-650. French S.S., Gonzalez-Suarez M., Young J.K., Durham S., and Gerber L.R. (2011). Human disturbance influences reproductive success and growth rate in California sea lions (Zalophus californianus). PLoS ONE 6(3): e17686. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017686. Gerard, P. D. and Sharp, J. L. (2011). Testing for Co-Directional Interactions Using Union-Intersection and Intersection-Union Methods. Journal of Applied Statistics 38(7): 1347. DOI: 10.1080/02664763.2010.498506 Gitau, M.W., I. Chaubey, E.E. Gbur and J.H. Pennington (2010). Impacts of land use change and BMP implementation in a CEAP watershed: Northwest Arkansas. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 65, 353-368. Hinchliffe, D.J., Meredith Jr, W.R., Yeater, K.M., Kim, H. (2010). Near-Isogenic Cotton Germplasm Lines that Differ in Fiber-Bundle Strength have Temporal Differences in Fiber Gene Expression Pattern as Revealed by Comparative High-Throughput Profiling. Theoretical and Applied Genetics 120:1347-1366. Horax, R., N. Hettiarachchy, K. Over, P.Y. Chen and E. Gbur (2010). Extraction, fractionation and characterization of bitter melon seed proteins. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 83, 1892-1897. Huwe, J. K., and West, M. (2011). Polybrominated diphenyl ethers in U.S. meat and poultry from two statistically designed surveys showing trends and levels from 2002 to 2008. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 59(10), 5428-5434. Jerez Rico, M., Ana Moret Barillas, O. Carrero Gámez, R. Macchiavelli, A. Quevedo Rojas (2011). Site index curves based on mixed models for teak plantations in the Venezuelan plains. 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An assessment of mixed-modeling approaches for characterizing profiles of time-varying response and predictor variables. Phytopathology 100: 1015-1029. Madden, L. V., and Paul, P. A. (2011). Meta-analysis for evidence synthesis in plant pathology: An overview. Phytopathology 101: 16-30. McRoberts, N., Hall, C., Madden, L.V., and Hughes, G. (2011). Perceptions of disease risk: From social construction of subjective judgments to rational decision making. Phytopathology 101: 654-665. Morgan, J. A., Lecain, D. R., Pendall, E., Blumenthal, D. M., Kimball, B. A., Carrillo, Y., Williams, D.G., Heisler-White, J., Dijkstra, F.A., and West, M. (2011). C4 grasses prosper as carbon dioxide eliminates desiccation in warmed semi-arid grassland. Nature, 476(7359), 202-205. Nelson, J.C., Mcclung, A.M., Fjellstrom, R.G., Moldenhauer, K.K., Boza, E., Jodari, F., Oard, J.H., Linscombe, S., Scheffler, B.E., Yeater, K.M. (2011). Mapping QTL main and interaction influences on milling quality in elite U.S. rice germplasm. Theoretical and Applied Genetics 122(2):291-309. Ngugi, H.K., Lehman, B.L., and Madden, L.V. (2011). Multiple treatment meta-analysis of products evaluated for control of fire blight in the Eastern United States. Phytopathology 101: 512-522. Paul, P. A., Hershman, D. E., McMullen, M. P., and Madden, L. V. (2010). Meta-analysis of the effects of triazole-based fungicides on wheat yield and test weight as influenced by Fusarium head blight intensity.Phytopathology 100: 160-171. Phlips, E. J., Badylak, S., Christman, M. C., Wolny, J., Brame, J., Garland, J., Hall, L., Hart, J., Landsberg, J., Lasi, M., Lockwood, J., Paperno, R., Scheidt, D., Staples, A., Steidinger, K. (2011). Scales of temporal and spatial variability in the distribution of harmful algae species in the Indian River Lagoon, Florida, USA. Harmful Algae 10, 277-290. Phlips, E. J., Badylak, S., Christman, M. C. and Lasi, M. A. 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Social Behaviour Drives the Dynamics of Respiratory Disease in Threatened Tortoises. Ecology, 91, 1257-1262. Xiao X., White E.P., Hooten M.B., and Durham S.L. (2011). On the use of log-transformation vs. nonlinear regression for analyzing biological power laws. Ecology. In press. Zagmajster, M., Culver, D. C., Christman, M. C., Sket, B. (2010). Using information on sampling intensity for exploring species richness patterns - can we trust what we see and where can we expect more? Biological Conservation, 19, 3035-3048.