About

Keith is an ecologist and biostatistician. After he completed his Ph.D. and Post-Doctoral Fellowships, he worked for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment in Dorset (from 1988 to 2015) where he published dozens of peer-reviewed articles describing the biological and physicochemical conditions of lakes and rivers in Ontario’s north. He has been (and still is) an Adjunct Faculty at the University of Toronto, Trent University, Nipissing University, and York University, where he variously supports and guides graduate student research and studies.

Keith is an expert biostatistician and has written articles describing multivariate methods (e.g., Principal Components Analysis, Mantel’s Test), randomization and permutation tests, and methods for data quality assurance and quality control.

Keith is well familiar with Environmental Effects Monitoring (EEM) programs, and the statistics involved in defining effects and effect sizes for surveys of benthic communities and fish populations.

Research Focus

Numerical methods for 1 – teasing apart the cumulative effects of multiple stressors on freshwater communities; 2 - characterizing the normal range of variation for healthy aquatic ecosystems and statistically evaluating the condition of potentially impaired test sites; 3 - selecting the best subset of metrics for assessing ecosystem health with respect to status and trends; 4 - combining the pass-fail results from multiple metrics and associated endpoints to trigger follow-up studies, and 5 – minimizing Type 1 (false positive) and Type 2 (false negative) errors in bioassessments

Sub-Disciplines

Aquatic ecology, numerical ecology, cumulative effects of multiple stressors, bioassessment, ecosystem health, Ontario lakes and streams, benthos, crayfish, fish

Research Areas