


Our Research Team

The Statistical Ecology at Dal (SEaDAL) Laboratory brings together researchers from various disciplines at Dalhousie University (DAL), to develop statistical methods for ecology. These methods include statistical methods & computational tools for marine animal movement, distribution, & population size, spatial multivariate modelling for fisheries data, as well as state space & hidden Markov modelling for marine tracking data. We are a highly collaborative & interdisciplinary team that develops flexible & interpretable approaches.
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The Researchers



Professor of Statistics
Joanna Mills Flemming

Areas of Expertise:
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State-space and hidden Markov models for animal movement data
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Close Kin Mark Recapture methods for estimating population size
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Fisheries spatio-temporal stock assessment models
Joanna Mills Flemming is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Dalhousie University. Her research interests centre on the development of statistical methodologies for data exhibiting spatial and/or temporal dependencies with a particular interest in tools for marine ecology, and more broadly, fisheries science.
Joanna holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science (1995) from the University of Guelph, an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics (1997) from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, and a Ph.D. in Statistics (2000) from Dalhousie University. She also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Econometrics at the University of Geneva (2002-2004).
Joanna is the Regional Director of CANSSI Atlantic and a member of the International Scientific Advisory Committee for the Ocean Tracking Network. She serves as an Associate Editor for The Canadian Journal of Statistics, Envirometrics, and, most recently, Movement Ecology.
Joanna builds multi-disciplinary collaborations by providing leadership in statistical science. Current collaborators include Clearwater Seafoods and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
joanna.flemming@dal.ca

Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Michael Dowd

Areas of Expertise:
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Nearshore Physical oceanography
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Ocean biogeochemical data assimilation
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State space models and time series
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Acoustic whale detection and forecasting
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Mike Dowd is a professor in the Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics at Dalhousie University and is cross-appointed in the Dept of Oceanography. Mike’s research specialty is environmental statistics with a particular interest in the novel space-time data types arising from new technological developments in the ocean sciences, and their fusion with dynamical models of ocean processes. He has a PhD in physical oceanography, and degrees in the environmental sciences. His research focus is on signal processing, time series analysis, and state space models. Current research projects include acoustic whale detection, quantification of ocean carbon in the northwest Atlantic, marine animal movement and forecasting, and modelling nearshore temperature dynamics for seagrass ecosystems.
michael.dowd@dal.ca

Assistant Professor of Statistics
Orla Murphy

Areas of Expertise:
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Extreme value analysis with applications to the environment, e.g., flood risk analyses.
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Multivariate and multivariate spatial modeling
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Clustering
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Discrete and mixed-type data
Orla Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Dalhousie University. Orla completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics with Honours at Saint Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, NS) and obtained an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Statistics at McGill University (Montréal, QC). After completing her graduate studies, Orla was a postdoctoral fellow in Computational Statistics at McMaster University (Hamilton, ON).
Orla’s research program includes (i) analyzing extreme environmental events and (ii) developing novel methods for modeling high-dimensional and heterogeneous data. The first component of her research program is focused on developing and using methods in extreme value analysis to model and predict extreme weather-related events, such as flooding. The second component includes research interests such as clustering, high-dimensional data, discrete and mixed-type data, and dependence modeling. Orla is currently supervising projects in multivariate spatial modeling, variable selection, and high-dimensional data clustering with applications in fisheries and health.​

Assistant Professor in Statistics
Theo Michelot

Areas of Expertise:
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Animal movement modelling
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Hidden Markov and state-space models
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Stochastic differential equations
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Habitat selection modelling
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Theo Michelot is an assistant professor in statistics, his main research interest is the analysis of animal movement data.
Together with his collaborators, he worked on increasing the biological realism of various models used for animal tracking data, such as hidden Markov models, stochastic differential equations, and habitat selection models. His research focuses on identifying the factors that influence animals' movement decisions, including environmental conditions and human disturbances. For example, he developed models for behavioral response studies, to determine whether marine mammals are impacted by ship sonars.
He is also interested in the effect that the spatiotemporal scale of ecological data has on biological inferences. It is often difficult to compare or combine data sets collected at different scales; new statistical models are needed to bridge this gap. This will be an important step towards joint analyses of multiple data types and an improved mechanistic understanding of pattern formation in animal space use.
theo.michelot@dal.ca

Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Andrew Irwin

Andrew Irwin is a professor of mathematics and statistics with a research focus on modeling in biological oceanography. His research aims to improve biological and ecological understanding of marine plankton including their roles in carbon biogeochemistry and food webs. A key focus is learning how to document and anticipate consequences of climate change on plankton and the marine biosphere. Scientists in his group take a highly interdisciplinary approach developing statistical, mathematical, and computational tools to extract information from experimental and observational data. Past projects have used regional and global-scale plankton occurrence data, biochemical data from controlled lab experiments, and molecular transcript data on individual species and communities. This work is made possible by a network of collaborators at Dalhousie and other universities. Prospective students are encouraged to review the lab web page and contact him to discuss how their experience and goals could fit within the work done in the lab.
a.irwin@dal.ca

Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) Research Scientist
David Keith

Areas of Expertise:
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Fisheries Science
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Stock Assessment
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Spatiotemporal modelling
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Dr. David Keith is a Research Scientist in the Scallop and Benthic Habitat Unit with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. His primary research focus is to develop methods in which environmental considerations are incorporated into the science advice provided to fisheries management, with an emphasis on Atlantic sea scallop (Placopecten Magellanicus). This research is multidisciplinary and has led to collaborations with a diverse team of oceanographers, statisticians, resource managers, and fisheries scientists. For Dr. Keith, the principle goal of these collaborations is the development of the next generation of stock assessment models that will explicitly incorporate habitat and spatial information into the stock assessment framework. In addition, he is using techniques developed in these collaborations to improve our understanding of future shifts in species distributions and to quantify the impact of fisheries on species of conservation concern.
David.Keith@dfo-mpo.gc.ca
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Research Associate
Charles Bangley

Areas of Expertise:
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Species distribution modeling
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Animal movement modeling
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Tree-based machine learning methods
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State-space behavioral modeling
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Charles Bangley is a Research Associate in the Mathematics & Statistics and Biology departments at Dalhousie University, where he works with the lab of Dr. Joanna Mills Flemming. He earned his BSc in Marine Biology at the University of Rhode Island and his MSc in Biology and PhD in Coastal Resources Management at East Carolina University. Prior to his move to Nova Scotia, Charles worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. His research focuses on movement and habitat selection behaviors of highly migratory marine species, with a focus on elasmobranchs. This work has involved fishery-independent surveys, acoustic and satellite-based telemetry, species distribution modeling using boosted regression trees and other machine learning methods, and hidden Markov modeling of telemetry data. His current research leverages acoustic telemetry data from dozens of collaborators to develop predictive models of migratory fish species in the upper Bay of Fundy to aid in risk assessment for tidal energy development and other marine spatial planning applications. He also continues to work on coastal shark and ray tracking data, with a goal of identifying potential distribution and habitat shifts for these highly mobile predators under the effects of climate change.
Charles.bangley@dal.ca
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Associate Professor
Craig Brown

Areas of Expertise:
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Seafloor habitat mapping
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Modelling spatial and temporal patterns in benthic biodiversity and habitat characteristics.
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Benthic ecosystem monitoring
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Craig J. Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University. His research focuses on studying benthic ecosystems from a geospatial perspective utilizing the latest seafloor habitat mapping methods and technologies – primarily focusing on marine acoustic remote sensing techniques. His main areas of research interest include the study of biophysical interactions in seafloor ecosystems to facilitate the development of effective fisheries and conservation management strategies. This interdisciplinary research involves spatial analysis of ecological, geological, geophysical, and oceanographic data sets to understand spatial and temporal patterns in benthic biodiversity and habitat characteristics for effective and sustainable ocean stewardship. Craig holds BSc. Hons in Zoology from the University of Reading, and a PhD in Marine Ecology from the University of Portsmouth in the UK. He has held government, academic and industry positions in both the UK and Canada before joining Dalhousie University in 2019, where he now leads the Seascape Ecology and Mapping (SEAM) laboratory.
craig.brown@dal.ca

Professor Emeritus of Statistics
Chris Field

Chris Field is a professor Emeritus of Statistics at Dalhousie University. Chris’s research has had a focus on robust methodology since 1976. In recent years his interests have focussed on developing appropriate robustness methodology for models in fisheries science. His current research has focussed on the robust analysis of tracking data where there is a need to protect against unusual behaviours in the animal tracks. In addition, he works on ensuring that the State Space models, which are becoming more extensively used in stack assessment models, have the built in robustness to provide reliable predictions for assessments in the presence of unusual species counts in a particular year.
chrisfield@gmail.com
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Post-Doctoral Fellow
Ethan Lawler

Ethan Lawler completed his Ph.D. in Statistics at Dalhousie University under the supervision of Joanna Mills Flemming and Chris Field. He has a strong background in mathematics and has been applying that knowledge to statistical models for marine ecology. His two main areas of research involve developing statistical models and software for analyzing animal movement and species distribution data. Statistical analyses in these areas are challenging due to the noisy and relatively uninformative data typical of the marine environment, as well as computational problems that arise when accounting for correlation across space and time.
et384729@dal.ca
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The Students



PhD Candidate in Statistics
Raphaël McDonald

Areas of Expertise:
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Univariate and multivariate spatial and spatio-temporal modelling, particularly in a state-space context
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Fisheries science, with a focus on stock assessment and ecology
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Sampling designs for observational studies
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Propagation of uncertainty
Raphaël McDonald is a current Ph.D. Candidate in Statistics under the supervision of Joanna Mills Flemming and David Keith. His interdisciplinary background combines marine biology/ecology with statistics, with specific applications to fisheries science and especially stock assessment. His Ph.D. work has broadly focused on the inclusion of spatio-temporal methods and novel types of data within stock assessment models, with a secondary focus on testing the impact of commonly ignored assumptions on modelling outputs and their greater impact on the science advice utilized within fisheries management decision-making processes. This work requires the development of novel statistical frameworks to properly deal with the noisy and often conflicting data common to fisheries alongside complex simulation experiments to attempt to answer difficult questions.
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Masters Student
Joseph Barss

Joseph Barss graduated from Mount Saint Vincent University in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Mathematics, specializing in Statistics. He is now pursuing a Master’s of Science in Statistics at Dalhousie University, researching spatiotemporal modelling of lobster abundance data with Dr. Joanna Mills Flemming and Dr. Théo Michelot. Joseph's interests include the analysis of ecological, environmental and socioeconomic data, spatial and spatiotemporal statistics, hierarchical modelling, and missing data imputation.
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Masters Student
Ethan O’Connell

Ethan O’Connell is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Statistics at Dalhousie University. He graduated from the University of New Brunswick in 2023 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with minors in Computer Science and Applied Science. Under the supervision of Michael Dowd, his research is mainly in the field of environmental statistics, with a focus on near-shore ocean temperature modelling and model validation. Other interests include time series analysis, computational statistics, and machine learning.
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PhD Student
Margo Paris

Having obtained a master’s in biology, I am currently pursuing a PhD in statistics at Dalhousie University, under the supervision of Dr. Joanna Mills Flemming and Dr. Théo Michelot. My current research projects focus on the analysis of animal movement data. This work requires the integration of several types of spatiotemporal data and the development of new statistical methods to attempt to answer specific questions. I am also interested in understanding the spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of marine animal populations.
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Personal Website

MSc candidate
Claire Cui

Co-supervisors: Orla Murphy, Paul McNicholas (McMaster University)
Research interests: clustering, multivariate modeling
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PhD Student in Statistics
Mohammad Amirianm

Personal Website

Past Student Testimonials



"After graduating with a BSc in Mathematics from Mount Saint Vincent University in May 2021, I embarked on my next adventure: pursuing a MSc in Statistics at Dalhousie University. During my time at Dal, I had the privilege of being supervised by Dr. Joanna Mills Flemming, who introduced me to the exciting world of ecological statistics.
My thesis compared three spatio-temporal species distribution modelling frameworks using Cucumaria frondosa on the Scotian Shelf as a case study. This project was highly applied and conducted in close collaboration with scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
Through my SEaDAL connections, I had the privilege of presenting my work at various workshops and conferences. These experiences not only enhanced my science communication skills, but also enabled me to establish valuable relationships with fellow scientists in the field.
I graduated from Dalhousie University in May 2023. Currently, I am immersed in a 17-month term at DFO, where I am contributing to the development of national guidelines for setting fishery reference points within the context of time-varying productivity. I would not be where I am today without the invaluable support and mentorship I received from Dr. Mills Flemming and SEaDAL."
- Nathan Hebert, MSc -