2026 Murray Lecture

Presented by Distinguished Professor Marti Anderson, PRIMER-e, Massey University, Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Global climate is rapidly changing, and many species (if they can) are actively responding to those changes by shifting their distributions. But where do they go? What options do they have? And how can we track their movements at broad spatial scales?

Answering these questions is far from straightforward. Data on species distributions are often difficult to collect, noisy and challenging to model. They are riddled with zeros – situations where researchers don’t see anything at all, even in the most suitable habitats. In other cases, a large flock or school of individuals can shoot past, producing unexpectedly high counts.

In this fascinating talk, Distinguished Professor Marti Anderson will reveal what typical species count data truly look like at large spatial scales and the statistical challenges involved in making sense of them. She will demonstrate how innovative new modelling approaches can be used to track changes in species abundance along temperature gradients and across latitudes.

Using these methods, Professor Anderson has uncovered and quantified remarkable global-scale shifts in the latitudinal distributions of hundreds of bird species and thousands of fish populations, often with surprising results.

Join us to discover how statistics can help uncover one of the most important biological responses to climate change: where species go when their world begins to change.

At the end of the talk, there will be a Q&A followed by refreshments.