Data are the foundation of environmental science and policy analysis. Clever data analysis can reveal secrets that would otherwise remain invisible in clouds of points, but statistical methods can also have pitfalls that casual users may not be aware of. In this workshop, the potential and pitfalls of diverse approaches to data analysis will be discussed and illustrated.

James Kirchner, director of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, taught a course on environmental data analysis at Berkeley for many years. In this workshop he will share his broad experience with data from many different fields of environmental science.