Analysing Environmental Data
By Allan Pentecost
May 1999
Pearson Education
ISBN: 058231058X
224 pages, Illustrated
$77.50 paper original
Analysing data and hypothesis testing are essential skills for environmental scientists. This introductory text, based on a successful course, is written specifically to build students' confidence in applying these skills to environmental problems. The text clearly explains basic principles and provides practice in their application through worked examples and problems based on real environmental examples, while referring throughout to software programs that make calculations easy to perform.
Specialized chapters address the specific needs of environmental science students including topics such as modeling, toxicity testing, and practical advice on questionnaire design which will be especially relevant to students carrying out environmental projects. The author has also included an overview of major techniques in multivariate analysis, recognizing their importance for environmental measurements in the field where variables such as wind-speed and temperature change continuously. Analysing Environmental Data is designed for undergraduate environmental science courses on data analysis and statistics in years 1 and 2. It is intended as a primer to more advanced texts.
Contents
Introduction; Conducting and Designing Experiments; Descriptive Statistics; Presentation of Data; The Normal Curve & Inferential Statistics; Frequency Distributions; Recognizing the Normal Distribution; Comparing Two Samples; Confidence Intervals for Means & Proportions; Analysis of Variance; Testing if a Relationship Occurs Between Two Variables Using Correlation; Mathematical Description of a Relationship Between Two Variables Using Regression; An Introduction to Modeling; An Introduction to Toxicity Testing; An Introduction to Multivariate Analysis; Questionnaires; Sampling and Experimental Design Revisited; Appendices; Glossary; Index.
Features " Simple introduction to experimental design and data analysis for environmental sciences " Based on an established course " Attractive style with clear figures, boxed material, key notes and a useful Glossary " Covers a widely used statistics package, Minitab " Numerous worked examples, problems and answers, which have been class-tested " Environmental examples throughout and specialized chapters for environmental sciences including coverage of questionnaires, modeling, toxicity testing and multivariate analysis
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