Brandon Edwards

Background

About Brandon Edwards

I am currently a PhD Candidate at Carleton University, co-supervised by Drs Adam Smith and Joe Bennett, and a part-time Wildlife Biologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. My research focuses on improving estimates of bird population sizes via detectability offsets. I am currently lead analyst on the NA-POPS project, which is seeking to develop an open-access database of detectability functions to account for biases in bird detectability during on- and off-road point count bird surveys. I use R and Stan regularly to develop multi-species Bayesian hierarchical removal and distance models to generate estimates of a bird species' availability and detectability, given a number of seasonal and spatial covariates. I completed my BSc in Mathematical Science in the Statistics stream, with an emphasis in Computer Science at the University of Guelph. My honours thesis, supervised by Dr Daniel Gillis, compared typologies of the Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) within the context of generalized spatial Poisson mixture models. I have worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr Gillis and Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs. I developed the Great Lakes Piping Plover Biological Modeling Program, which seeks to create tools to assist in management and recovery of Great Lakes piping plovers (Charadrius melodus circumcinctus). I also completed a 4-month co-op term working as a Bird Population Monitoring Analyst at Environment and Climate Change Canada in Summer 2018. In that position, I tested the use of generalized additive mixed-models for improving status and trend estimates of North American breeding birds, and developed the R package bbsBayes.