William A. Link 

USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center 
11510 American Holly Drive 
Laurel, MD 20708-4017

Telephone: 301-497-5631

Fax: 301-497-5455

Email: wlink@usgs.gov

Mathematical Statistician 

Primary Responsibilities: 
Mathematical Statistician, Biometrics Group, 1987-Present.  
Duties include development of mathematical models and analytical tools for investigation of ecological questions and for monitoring of wildlife populations, service as consultant to quantitative ecologists and biologists. Current research includes application of Bayesian methods to hierarchical models. 

Education/Training: 
University of Massachusetts at Amherst 
M.A., Ph.D., Mathematical Statistics, 1983, 1986. 
Dissertation: Contributions to Reliability Theory and Survival Analysis 
Western Maryland College, B.A., Mathematics 1980.

Active Projects:
Statistical methods for count survey data 
Development of new statistical methods for biological applications 

Book: "Bayesian Inference for Ecologists" with R.J. Barker

Selected Publications:

PDF's of these and other publications available at       ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/er/md/laurel/Research/Link/Papers/

• Link, W.A., and Sauer, J.R. (2007) Seasonal components of avian population change: joint analysis of two large-scale monitoring programs. Ecology, 88(1): 49–55.
• Royle, J.A. and Link, W.A. (2006) Generalized site occupancy models allowing for false positive and false negative errors. Ecology, 87(4): 835-841.
• Link, W.A., and Barker, R.J. (2006) Model weights and the foundations of multimodel inference. Ecology, 87: 2626–2635 .
• Link, W.A., and Barker, R.J. (2005) Modeling association among demographic parameters in analysis of open population capture-recapture data. Biometrics 61, 46-54.
• Link, W.A. (2003). Nonidentifiability of population size from capture-recapture data with heterogeneous detection probabilities, Biometrics 59:1123-1130.
• Link, W.A., Royle, J.R., and Hatfield, J.S. (2003). Demographic analysis from summaries of an age-structured population, Biometrics 59: 778-785.
• Link, W.A., and Sauer, J.R. (2002). Hierarchical analysis of population change with application to Cerulean Warblers. Ecology 83(10), 2832-2840.
• Cam, E., Link, W.A., Cooch, E.G., Monnat, J-Y., and Danchin, E. (2002) Individual covariation in life-history traits: seeing the trees despite the forest. American Naturalist, 159(1): 96-105.
• Sauer, J.R. and Link, W.A. (2002) Hierarchical modeling of population stability and species group attributes from survey data. Ecology 86(6):1743-1751.
• Link, W.A., Cam, E., Nichols, J.D., and Cooch, E.G. (2002). Of BUGS and Birds: Markov chain Monte Carlo for hierarchical modeling in wildlife research. Journal of Wildlife Management 66(2):277-291.
• Link, W.A., Cooch, E.G., and Cam, E . (2002) Model-based estimation of individual fitness. Journal of Applied Statistics 29: 207-224.
• Link, W.A., and Sauer, J.R. (1997). Estimation of population trajectories from count data. Biometrics 53(2), 488-497. 29:19-48.
• Link, W.A. and Sauer, J.R. (1996). Extremes in ecology: avoiding the misleading effects of sampling variation in summary analyses Ecology 77(5), 1633
• Link, W.A. and Barker, R.J. (1994). Density estimation using the trapping web design: a geometric analysis. Biometrics 50, 733-745.
• Link, W.A. (1989). Testing for exponentiality against monotone failure rate average alternatives. Communications in Statistics: Theory and Methods, 18(8), 3009-3017