Rebecca Hutchinson

Much of my work is on computational methods for species distribution modeling, in which data describing sightings of a species are combined with environmental variables to produce habitat models. I work primarily with hierarchical latent variable models that represent both ecological and observation processes.  My current research is on robust parameter estimation methods for these models and techniques for incorporating semi-parametric techniques into probabilistic models.  I am also interested in methods for analyzing species interaction networks and strategies for evaluating species distribution models.