GRASPA
GRASPA Conference 2009 is the final meeting of two Italian Relevant National Research Projects (PRIN-MIUR-2006) on environmental statistics and it is aimed at the discussion of the relevant scientific issues with the community of all attendees.
"Statistical analysis and modelling of impact and risk for environmental phenomena in space and time" is coordinated by Alessandro Fasso, University of Bergamo. It is involved in statistical issues concerning air, water, soil and health with temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal dynamics, with three main objectives.
The first one is to improve empirical knowledge on the dynamics of environmental risk and health effects related to pollution and meteorology.
The second one is to promote the use of best practice and advanced methods and models among public agencies involved in environmental data and analyses.
The third aims at a diffused experimentation on hierarchical modeling and application to environmental problems with temporal, spatial or spatio-temporal components.
"Methods for collecting and analyzing environmental data" is coordinated by Lucio Barabesi, University of Siena. This project has three main research lines.
The first issue deals with the use of replications of encounter sampling strategies for estimating the target parameters of a biological population scattered over a spatial study region.
The second issue has been devoted to hierarchical Bayesian modelling in small area estimation and abundance estimation.
The third issue has been dedicated to models for extreme values associated with optimal sampling strategies under a super-population approach.
GRASPA (Research Group for Statistical Applications to Environmental Problems) is an Italian research group that studies the environment from the statistical point of view.
The group is composed by ten local research units and is coordinated by Gianfranco Lovison, who works in Palermo University.
The goals of GRASPA
The assessment of status and dynamics of environment quality is a fundamental issue as poor quality environments
imply serious risks for human health.
The study of environment is a complex task, bound to require good skill in such diverse fields as environmental
data sampling and measuring, space-time modeling and study of the environment impact on the health of human population.
Statistical methods are an invaluable tool in every step of the analysis of environmental phenomena.
The objective of this research group is to stimulate the interaction among researchers in different fields,
causing the development of new statistical methods and the study of their capabilities when they are applied to real data sets.
