Our February installment of the PPG Speaker Series will feature Dr. Peter Minchin. Dr. Minchin received his B.S. in Botany from the University of Tasmania in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Tasmania in 1984. After various research and teaching positions in Australia and the USA, he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at SIUE in 2004 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010. He also holds the position of Chair of the North American Section and a member of the Governing Board of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) as well as Associate Editor of the journal Plant Ecology. His main research interest is the development and evaluation of multivariate statistical methods for analyzing ecological communities and the application of these methods to the conservation and restoration of communities.
“In order to evaluate the success of community restoration, clear goals and explicit quantitative criteria that assess progress toward the desired future condition are needed.” Dr. Minchin has developed Trajectory Analysis, a new statistical analysis that tests the hypothesis that community composition is changing in a manner that indicates successful restoration. “Community data are summarized by non-metric multidimensional scaling and the time trajectory of each site within the ordination space is examined. Statistics are calculated that express the degree to which each site’s trajectory aligns with a specified target direction. The method can assess whether communities are heading in the desired direction, even if they have not yet attained their target composition.” Dr. Minchin will demonstrate the potential of Trajectory Analysis using wetland restoration data from Disney Wilderness Preserve, Florida and temperate forest data from southwestern Illinois.
The program will be on Monday, February 8th, 2016, at the First Unitarian Church, 110 E. Third Street in Alton and starts at 7:30 p.m. Attendees and friends are invited to have dinner and meet the speaker at Princivalli's Restaurant, 602 E 3rd St, Alton, IL 62002, starting at 5:30 p.m. 
Dr. Minchin (far right) with a group of SIUE students at Volcan Baru National Park, Cerro Punta, Panama.