Math Chats: The Statistical Modeling Of Interspecies Competition On The Growth Of Trees

Professors Albert Y. Kim will discuss research with Professor David Allen on a statistical model of a tree’s growth as a function of current size and the competition it feels.
Prof. Allen conducted censuses in a Michigan reserve, recording the location, species, and size of all trees in both 2008 and 2014. They seek a statistical model that incorporates notions of the numbers, the sizes, the spatial density, and the species of the competitor trees

Current models encounter the issue of small sample sizes: for certain pairs of species we have very few observations. We present a Bayesian alternative we are currently working on that allow us to leverage similarities between certain species of trees within the same family.