Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Technical program: The meeting began at 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, July 13 with opening remarks by Jun Zhu and Murray Clayton, Director of the Biometry Program at Wisconsin. Technical presentations in the morning session were given by Jun Zhu (Statistical modeling of spatial-temporal data in a forest entomology study) and George Fernandez (A SAS macro application for all possible model selection in PROC MIXED). Presentations in the afternoon session were given by Dan Nettleton (Microarray experimental design and analysis), Roxana Alexandridis (A unified approach to discover and classify tumor types using microarray data) Rob Tempelman (Hierarchical modeling of microarray data) and David Meek (Signal processing analysis using discrete Fourier transforms). The afternoon session ended at approximately 5:00 p.m. On Friday morning after the business meeting, Walt Stroup made the final techical presentation entitled "Initial experiences with SAS Proc GLIMMIX." Business meeting: The business meeting began at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, July 14 with Ed Gbur presiding. Jun Zhu and Don Bullock were thanked for providing an enjoyable meeting. The following items were discussed. (1) Next years meeting tentatively will be held jointly with USSES in Utah. The local arranagements chair will be Susan Durham and the program chair will be Mark Hinds. After some discussion it was decided to have the meeting on July 26-27 instead of the ususal mid-July dates because the Joint Statistics Meetings will be July 29-August 2 in Salt Lake City. It was felt that the later meeting date would help with travel costs for those attending JSM. The 2008 meeting was scheduled for Ohio. (2) Ed Gbur reported that the project has been renewed until 2011. The current project ends on September 30 and the new project will begin on October 1. Final reports are no longer required since now the Directors use the set of annual reports, especially the accomplishments and impacts as they relate to our objectives, as the basis of their evaluation. (3) Project members were reminded to send their contributions for the accomplishment, output and impact sections of the annual report to Ed (egbur@uark.edu) as soon as possible. The reporting period for this years report is July 2005 through September 2006. In the future, reporting periods will coincide with the Federal fiscal year. The target completion date for the report is mid-August to avoid the beginning of fall semester. In the past, items have included publications (refereed and non-refereed), presentations (indicate if invited), workshops, grants, consulting projects, organization of sessions at meetings, teaching (for their effect on future scientists) and awards received. The annual report has a section entitled "Accomplishments and Impacts." The accomplishment part is straightforward. Impacts are a bit more difficult so any input as to the impact of what you are reporting would be very much appreciated. (4) Don Bullock presented a report on his efforts to offer the spatial workshop at the annual meetings of various subject matter disciplines. He contacted the plant pathologists, entomologists, agricultural engineers and agronomists. As a result of his efforts, the workshop will be presented at the plant pathology annual meetings on July 29 in Quebec by Bruce Craig and Murray Clayton. Don believes that we will be approved for the 2007 agronomy meetings but was unsuccessful this year with the entomologists and agricultural engineers. He offered the following lessons that he learned this year about scheduling workshops: (a) Subject matter groups are interested in our workshops. (b) Find the right person to communicate with and keep the lines of communication open. Don't assume that the other person will take care of all of the details if you don't touch base with them regularly throughout the selection and scheduling process. (c) Make sure that reimbursement arrangements are understood by all parties in advance. Discussion then turned to future workshop offerings. It was noted that regional society meetings might be easier to deal with than national meetings and that it may take more than one try before being successful. It was also decided that the mixed model workshop would continue to be offered if organizations are interested. Walt Stroup suggested that ASA chapter meetings which target graduate students and M.S. level statisticians working outside of academics might be another place to do our workshops. John Boyer agreed to mention the availability of our workshops at the Council of Chapters meeting at JSM. Walt also suggested that agriculturally oriented social science groups might be interested in our workshops. The following people agreed to contact subject matter groups about our mixed model and spatial workshops: Sara Duke  Society of Range Management; Walt Stroup  horticulture; Rob Tempelman  animal sciences; Susan Durham  ecology; Larry Douglass  entomology; Don Bullock  agronomy. Mary Christman will be contacted to check on the wildlife societies. (5) The group discussed the focus on the new project since the new objective as described in the renewal request was very broad. Ed Gbur suggested that our group is large enough to have two separate topics related to the objective. The consensus of the members was that the two topics are genomics and generalized linear mixed models. Next years program should reflect both topics if possible. The meeting adjourned at approximately 10:15 a.m. and was followed by the last presentation on the technical program.

Workshops: The spatial statistics workshop was presented to a group of 40 participants at the Joint Meeting of the American Phytopathological Society, the Canadian Phytopathological Society and the Mycological Society of America in Quebec on July 2006 by Bruce Craig and Murray Clayton. The workshop is also scheduled to be presented at the Tri-Societies (ASA-CSSA-SSSA) annual meeting in November 2006. David Meek presented two in-house mixed model workshops at the National Soil Tilth Laboratory in December 2005 and February 2006. USDA-ARS statisticans 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 presentations were made by project members: Mary Christman. Lattice models with spatial dependencies: An introduction. Jun Zhu. Spatial sampling design and strategies. Mark Otto and David Meek. Diagnostics for spatial models. Mark West. Combining multi-scale spatial data.

Presentations: Selected presentations at the 2006 Kansas State Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture were made by: George Fernandez. A SAS macro application for all possible model selection in the PROC MIXED procedure. David Meek (with J.W. Singer). Terrain effects on corn yield during a 7 year small-plot study. Bahman Shafii (with T.S. Prather, W.J. Price, L.W. Lass and D. Howard). Modelling dispersal of yellow starthistle in the canyon grasslands of North Central Idaho. Bruce Craig coauthored (with R. Becker) an invited presentation at the Joint Statistics Meetings in Minneapolis in August 2005 entitled "Metrics used to evaluate the Purdue University's Statistical Consulting Service." Mary Christman presented an invited paper entitled "Statistical issues in surveys of invasive species" at USDA-APHIS in March 2005 at Riverdale, Maryland. Bruce Craig coauthored (with N.S. Mosier) an invited paper entitled "Predicting cell capture from dilute samples for microfluidic biosensors" at an NISS Workshop: Food Safety at Iowa State University in October 2005. Mary Christman presented an invited paper entitled "Effect of model misspecification on estimating a spatial average" at the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society annual meeting in June 2006. Mary Christman presented an invited paper entitled "Application and comparison of alternative spatial modeling approaches of zero inflated data" at the Joint Statistical Meetings in August 2006. Bruce Craig made a presentation entitled "Critically assessing the statistical methods section: Common issues to consider when reading published papers" at the Purdue Department of Animal Science Seminar Series in September 2005.

Other project related activities: George Fernandez served as an associate editor for statistics for American Society for Horticultural Sciences Journal, Hort Science and American Potato Research Journal. Bruce Craig developed and taught a new course entitled "Statistical Consulting and Collaboration." The course is a required course for the Applied Master's Degree in Statistics at Purdue University. He used a variety of ideas discussed at NCCC-170 meetings as part of the course materials.

Aukema, B.H., A.L. Carroll, J. Zhu, K.F. Raffa, T.A. Sickley and S.W. Taylor (2006). Landscape level population dynamics of mountain pine beetle in British Columbia, Canada: Searching for origins and possible mechanisms of the present outbreak. Ecography, 29, 427-441. Christman, M. C., D.C. Culver, M.K. Madden and D. White (2005). Patterns of endemism of the Eastern North American cave fauna. Journal of Biogeography, 32, 1441-1452. Christman, M. C. and E.N.H. Leone (2006). Statistical aspects of the analysis of group size effects in confined animals. Applied Animal Behavior Science. Corrected proofs available at doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2006.05.020. Christman, M. C. and D. Lewis (2005). The spatial distribution of dominant animals within a group: Comparison of four tests. Animal Behaviour, 70, 73-82. Ericksena, A., M.S. Gustin, M. Xina, P.J. Weisberga and G.C.J. Fernandez (2006). Airsoil exchange of mercury from background soils in the United States. Science of the Total Environment, 366, 851-863. Estevez, I. and M.C. Christman (2006). Analysis of the movement and use of space by animals in confinement. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 97, 221-240. Hartle, .R.T, G.C.J. Fernandez and R.S. Nowak (2005). Horizontal and vertical zones of influence for root systems of four Mojave Desert shrubs. Journal of Arid Environments, 64,586-603. Ives, A.R. and J. Zhu (2006). Statistics for correlated data: phylogenies, space, and time. Ecological Applications, 16, 20-32. Johnson, D., H. Zhang and R. Alldrege (2006). Spatial pattern of verticillium wilt in commercial mint fields. Plant Disease, 90, 789-797. Jensen, O. P., M. C. Christman, and T. J. Miller (2006). Landscape-based geostatistics: A case study of the distribution of blue crab in Chesapeake Bay. Environmetrics, 17, 605-621. Karlen, D.L., E.G. Hurley, S.S. Andrews, C.A. Cambardella, D.W. Meek, M.D. Duffy, and A.P. Mallarino (2006). Crop rotation effects on soil quality at three northern corn/soybean belt locations. Agronomy Journal, 98, 484-495. Kaspar, T.C., T.B. Parkin, D.B. Jaynes, C.A. Cambardella, D.W. Meek, and Y.S. Jung (2006). Examining changes in soil organic carbon with oat and rye cover crops using terrain covariates. Soil Science Society of America Journal,70, 1168-1177. Medina, R. F., P. Barbosa, M.C. Christman and A. Battisti (2006). Number of individuals and molecular markers to use in genetic differentiation studies. Molecular Ecology Notes. Corrected proofs available online at doi:10.1111/j.1471-8286.2006.01476.x. Meek, D.W., J.H. Prueger, W.P. Kustas, and J.L. Hatfield (2005). Determining meaningful differences for SMACEX eddy covariance measurements. Journal of Hydrometorology, 6(6), 805-811. Pascual, J. and H. Zhang (2006). Estimation of linear correlation coefficient of two correlated spatial processes. Sankhya. In press. Pipan, T., M.C.Christman and D.C. Culver (2006). Dynamics of epikarstic communities: Microgeographic pattern and environmental determinants of epikarstic copepods in Organ Cave, West Virginia. American Midland Naturalist, 156, 75-87. Sauer, T.J., C.A. Cambardella, and D.W.Meek (2006). Spatial variation of soil properties relating to vegetation changes, Plant and Soil, 280, 1-5. Smithwick, E.A.H., M.C. Mack, M.G. Turner, F.S. Chapin III, J. Zhu, and T.C. Balser (2005). Spatial heterogeneity of ecosystem processes after severe fire in a black spruce (Picea mariana) forest, Alaska. Biogeochemistry, 76, 517-537. Tomer, M.D., D.W. Meek, and L.A. Kramer (2005). Agricultural practices influence flow regimes of headwater streams in Western Iowa. Journal of Environmental Quality, 34, 1547-1558. Zhang, H. and D. Zimmerman (2005). Toward reconciling two asymptotic frameworks in spatial statistics. Biometrika, 92, 921-936. Zhang, H. (2006). Maximum likelihood estimation for multivariate spatial linear coregionalization models. Environmetrics. In press. Zhu, J., H.-C. Huang and C.T. Wu (2005). Modeling spatial-temporal binary data using Markov random fields. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics, 10, 212-225. Zhu, Z. and H. Zhang (2006). Spatial sampling design under the infill asymptotic framework. Environmetrics, 17, 323-337.