Congratulations to Katherine Hébert for receiving the Committee Award at the Biodiversity_Next conference for her poster presentation.
Katherine is a very active BIOS² Fellow since the beginning of the program. She went to the Biodiversity_Next Conference in Leiden (The Netherlands) last October (2019) to present her research related to her PhD project (https://bios2.usherbrooke.ca/katherine-hebert/).
Here is what she presented:
We suggest a methodological approach to address the growing uncertainty [in measuring biodiversity change], in order to improve the reliability of the LPI. We propose a methodology for integrating the covariation between population trends into the computation of the LPI, in order to bolster confidence in related trends and ultimately decrease imprecision. Rather than assuming all population trends are varying in isolation, we explicitly identify covariation between population trends, and weight populations according to this covariation. We then compare the confidence intervals of the reported LPI trend to the trend obtained using our proposed methodology, and consider the potential political, ecological, and communicational implications of this approach on the interpretation of biodiversity metrics.
See the full abstract here: https://biss.pensoft.net/article/36517/
Look at her poster.