The International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) is the main international gathering of statistical ecologists. It is an inclusive interdisciplinary conference at the interface between statistics and ecology. By closing the gap between ecology and statistics, two aims are achieved – helping ecologists discover new and state of the art statistical & machine learning methods and learn how best to use them, whilst at the same time make statisticians aware of the top priority methodological problems ecologists would like to solve.
ISEC is a biennial conference, since the first conference in 2008 at St Andrews (Scotland, UK), followed by Canterbury (2010, UK), Krokkleiva (Norway, 2012), Montpellier (2014, France), Seattle (2016, USA), St Andrews (2018, Scotland, UK), Sydney (2020, Australia – virtual conference), Cape Town (2022, South Africa), Swansea (2024, Wales, UK). In January 2027, it will be held in Mérida, México, as an in-person conference, organized by the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY) and the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM).
Through talks, posters and workshops, a broad range of topics are typically covered including abundance estimation, animal movement, biodiversity, capture-recapture, citizen science, community dynamics, computer vision, disease ecology, distance sampling, epidemiology, evolutionary ecology, fisheries, individual-based models, integrated population models, metapopulation dynamics, microbiome, multispecies models, occupancy models, population dynamics, spatial ecology, species distribution models, and survey design.
Plenary Speakers

Patricia Koleff Osorio
National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO)
Government of México
Workshops
INLA and beyond: Bayesian hierarchical modelling with inlabru
Jafet Belmont Osuna, University of Glasgow
1-day
Co-occurrence modelling in practice – understanding flexible models for species co-occurrence in frequentist and Bayesian frameworks
Albert Bonet Bigata, University of Aberdeen
Amber Cowans, University of St Andrews
Chris Sutherland, University of St Andrews
1-day
Bayesian disease ecology: mechanistic models for epidemics, invasive species and beyond
Dr. Rob Deardon, University of Calgary
Caitlin Ward, University of Minnesota
1-day
Residual diagnostics of generalized linear (mixed-effects) models with DHARMa
Melina de Souza Leite, University of Regensburg
Florian Hartig, University of Regensburg
1-day
Best Practices for Species Distribution Modeling using Participatory Science Data
Matt Strimas-Mackey, Cornell University
Anna Lello-Smith, Wildlife Conservation Society, Mesoamerica & Western Caribbean
Andrew Stillman, Cornell University
1-day
Joint species distribution modelling for DNA metabarcoding data with HMSC
Otso Ovaskainen, University of Helsinki
Nerea Abrego, University of Jyväskylä
Jennifer Kampe, University of Jyväskylä
Brendan Furneaux, University of Jyväskylä
Sten Anslan, University of Jyväskylä
1-day
Deep Species Distribution Modeling and other regression models with the cito R package
Maximilian Pichler, University of Regensburg
Florian Hartig, University of Regensburg
1-day
Integrated movement models for telemetry and species distribution data
Frances Buderman, Pennsylvania State University
Ephraim Hanks, Pennsylvania State University
Dave Miller, Pennsylvania State University
Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Half-day
Reliably inferring biodiversity metrics from continuously collected monitoring data classified with AI
Aimée Freiberg, University of Fribourg
Daniel Wegmann, University of Fribourg
1-day
An Introduction to Close-Kin Mark-Recapture for Fisheries Applications
Joanna Mills Flemming, Dalhousie University
Half-day
Bayesian hidden Markov models for animal movement time series
Vianey Leos Barajas, University of Toronto
1-day
Important Dates
Workshop Submissions
Open: October 2025
Close: November 15, 2025
Roundtable Submissions
Open: October 2025
Close: November 15, 2025
Contributed Talks & Posters
Open: February 2026
Close: May 2026
Notification of Acceptance: July 2026
Registration
Early Bird Opens:
March 2026
Early Bird Closes:
September 2026
Contact: isec.statistical.ecology@gmail.com




