Miguel Hernández University of Elche

The applicant research group is formed by members of 3 universities of the Valencian Community (Miguel Hernández University of Elche -UMH-, University of Alicante -UA- and University of Valencia -UV-). The working group is made up of a statistician, two biologists, a telecommunications engineer and two mathematicians with extensive experience in modeling in life science environments, whether it is the study of fisheries and marine protected areas, location of critical habitats, environmental management of aquaculture, delimitation of bioclimatic zones, analysis of indicators, remote sensing, climate change, as well as the application of spatio-temporal models to other research areas such as, for example, epidemiology, veterinary medicine, and phytopathology (in these three cases seeking to understand the spatial distribution of diseases, both those affecting humans and those affecting animals or plants).

The research capacity of the applicant group is attested by more than 200 articles in high impact journals published in the last 5 years. Furthermore, about 50 of them are fully related to the proposed methodology to be used in this Expression of Interest. Specifically on the topics of:
1. Location of optimal areas for aquaculture.
2. Analysis of fishery indicators.
3. Bayesian spatio-temporal hierarchical modeling of species distribution. From the simplest modeling to the most complex models that require the inclusion of the temporal component, species detection, problems of excess of zeros, physical barriers, preferential sampling, etc.
4. Incorporation of the biotic component into species distribution models (study of the relationship between species).
5. Identification of persistent hot-spots for marine species.
6. Environmental management of aquaculture and climate change.
7. Remote sensing.