Having indicators to assess the effect of zootechnical, sanitary, economic or political intervention or the impact of environmental risks makes it possible to draw up strategies for improving domestic animal populations. This handbook is a compilation of the main concepts relating to the definition and calculation of demographic rates for largely non-intensive tropical animal farms. It is intended to be educational, and should help students, technicians, engineers, researchers and developm...

A highly accessible alternative approach to basic statistics Praise for the First Edition: "Certainly one of the most impressive little paperback 200-page introductory statistics books that I will ever see . . . it would make a good nightstand book for every statistician."—TechnometricsWritten in a highly accessible style, Introduction to Statistics through Resampling Methods and R, Second Edition guides students in the understanding of descriptive statistics, estimation, hypothesi...

This edition is a collection in two volumes of the presentations at the 8th international conference of an FAO network on recycling agricultural, municipal and industrial waste that was held in Rennes, France, from 26th to 29th May 1998. The theme of the conference was management strategies for organic waste used in agriculture and it was organised in five parts: management strategies for organic waste used in agriculture, agronomic value of organic waste, measuring, modelling and manageme...

Introducing Survival Analysis and Event History Analysis is an accessible, practical and comprehensive guide for researchers and students who want to understand the basics of survival and event history analysis and apply these methods without getting entangled in mathematical and theoretical technicalities. Inside, readers are offered a blueprint for their entire research project from data preparation to model selection and diagnostics.Engaging, easy to read, functional and packed ...

Applied Survival Analysis Using R covers the main principles of survival analysis, gives examples of how it is applied, and teaches how to put those principles to use to analyze data using R as a vehicle. Survival data, where the primary outcome is time to a specific event, arise in many areas of biomedical research, including clinical trials, epidemiological studies, and studies of animals. Many survival methods are extensions of techniques used in linear regression and categoric...

The results presented in this book summarize the main findings of the CARBOFOR project, which brought together 52 scientists from 14 research units to investigate the effects of future climate on the carbon cycle, the productivity and vulnerability of French forests. This book explains the current forest carbon cycle in temperate and Mediterranean climates, including the dynamics of soil carbon and the total carbon stock of French forests, based on forest inventories. It reviews and illust...

Agent-based modeling is a flexible and intuitive approach that is close to both data and theories, which gives it a special position in the majority of scientific communities. Agent models are as much tools of understanding, exploration and adaptation as they are media for interdisciplinary exchange. It is in this kind of framework that this book is situated, beginning with agent-based modeling of spatialized phenomena with a methodological and practical orientation. Through a governing ex...

This book introduces the key stages of niche-based habitat suitability model building, evaluation and prediction required for understanding and predicting future patterns of species and biodiversity. Beginning with the main theory behind ecological niches and species distributions, the book proceeds through all major steps of model building, from conceptualization and model training to model evaluation and spatio-temporal predictions. Extensive examples using R support graduate students an...

Within the framework of the COST working group (E3-WG1, 1994-1998), this document presents 15 research papers on the following topics: the European public challenge concerning forest landscapes, environmental and economic aspects, integration of non-commercial values, attitudes of farmers and of the rural world, reafforestation of agricultural lands, public opinion, perception, preferences and appropriation, perception by those involved at the local level, recreational forests.

Although they are believed to be unsolvable in general, tractability results suggest that some practical NP-hard problems can be efficiently solved. Combinatorial search algorithms are designed to efficiently explore the usually large solution space of these instances by reducing the search space to feasible regions and using heuristics to efficiently explore these regions. Various mathematical formalisms may be used to express and tackle combinatorial problems, among them the constraint s...

Principles of Big Data helps readers avoid the common mistakes that endanger all Big Data projects. By stressing simple, fundamental concepts, this book teaches readers how to organize large volumes of complex data, and how to achieve data permanence when the content of the data is constantly changing. General methods for data verification and validation, as specifically applied to Big Data resources, are stressed throughout the book. The book demonstrates how adept analysts can find relat...

Since it first appeared in 1996, the open-source programming language R has become increasingly popular as an environment for statistical analysis and graphical output. In addition to being freely available, R offers several advantages for biostatistics, including strong graphics capabilities, the ability to write customized functions, and its extensibility. This is the first textbook to present classical biostatistical analysis for epidemiology and related public health sciences to studen...