Modern statistical methods for clustering community ecology data

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef ecosystem on the planet, contributing an estimated $6.5 billion in annual revenue and 64,000 jobs to the Australian economy. Climate change is responsible for an unprecedented decline in the health of the Reefs coral, posing the single most significant threat to its survival. Policymakers and practitioners currently struggle to make evidence-based decisions and interventions for the Reefs survival due to the limitations of existing statistical techniques used to analyse large, complex multi-species datasets. This project will create cutting-edge statistical methods to help practitioners identify how coral communities will evolve over space and time in response to climate change. The knowledge and translational tools developed will be shared with conservation managers and environmental policymakers in the form of user-friendly software to help them improve Reef health monitoring, evaluation, and resource planning, and more eff