In collaboration with interested agencies, institutions, and projects, the center has an ongoing program of research that integrates statistics, ecology, and the environment. The emphasis is on individual and collaborative research, training, and exposition on improving the quantification and communication of man's impact on the environment. Major interest also lies in statistical investigations of the environment's impact on man.

The center's broad research areas relate to statistical ecology, environmental statistics, and quantitative risk analysis, with emphasis on mathematical statistics, statistical methodology, and data interpretation and improvement for future use. The adopted approach is to advance statistics for environment, ecology, and environmental health, and to advance environmental and ecological theory and practice using valid statistics.

Students participate as graduate research assistants and interns, at both the center and the collaborating agencies' sites. The students benefit from ongoing miniseminars on individual collaborative research between interested faculty and visiting scientists. These involvements usually lead to Ph.D. dissertations and master's term papers for students in statistics and environmental sciences. Sometimes they lead to more theoretical or more substantive investigations. More than 100 graduate students, interns and visitors have participated in one capacity or the other.

Current research projects and activities include:

• advanced raster map analysis
• geospatial statistics
• geographic information systems and remote sensing
• accuracy assessment and change detection using remote sensing data
• innovative sampling and observational economy
• ecological sampling and analysis
• environmental monitoring and assessment
• integration of environmental data and information
• biodiversity measurement and comparison, and
• superfund site characterization and evaluation under cooperative research agreements with interested agencies and institutions.

The center serves as the headquarters of a cross-disciplinary journal, Environmental and Ecological Statistics, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers with Professor G. P. Patil, as the founding editor-in-chief.

The center has had a series of technical research publications that describe its contributions to statistics both in statistical and environmental practice. Research areas have included:

• species abundance models
• chance mechanisms
• logarithmic series
• spatial statistics
• encountered data
• survey design and sampling
• diversity and abundance
• risk analysis
• Chesapeake Bay stock assessment
• stochastic models
• ecological assessment with GLIM and quasi-likelihood
• hazardous waste site characterization
• ranked set sampling
• composite samples
• landscape ecology
• geospatial multiscale assessment
• perspectives
• bibliographic
• advanced raster map analysis
• accuracy assessment and change detection analysis
• echelon analysis
• hierarchical transition matrix analysis, and
• landscape fragmentation profiles.

The center has been headquarters to the green series of fourteen thematic monograph publications on statistical ecology and the blue series of fourteen thematic monograph publications on distributions in scientific work, published by Penn State Press, International Cooperative Publishing House, and the Reidel Publishing Company.

The center has also been headquarters to several timely initiatives and activities involving various professional statistical, ecological and environmental organizations and government agencies, such as ASA, ESA, Intecol, IBS, ISI, EPA, NOAA, USFS, and NSF.