Overview

Environmental statistics is simply the application of statistical methods to problems concerning the environment. It is a special field of statistics based on probability and statistics. It is often conceived to be a set of tools environmental scientists used to derive quantitative conclusion from their data obtained from systems in various fields including hydrology, ecology, geology, chemistry, epidemiology, oceanography, and atmospheric modelling. Though this field is relatively young, the relevant data analysis methods have been widely used for environmental research and practical activities such as:

monitoring air or water quality;
environmental monitoring near a hazardous or solid waste site;
risk assessment to determine whether a potentially contaminated/ physically degraded area needs to be cleaned up/ restored, and if so, how much;
assessing whether a previously contaminated/ physically degraded area has been cleaned up/ restored according to some specific criteria; and
risk analysis for flood mapping.

In spite of the usefulness and wide applicability of environmental statistics for data analysis in environmental management, misusing of statistical methods will always lead to misinterpretation of the situation and inappropriate decision making. To avoid such problem, it is important to understand the fundamental theories underlying the statistical methods commonly used for environmental data analysis, why and how to apply them on different types of data, and how to interpret the statistics results without bias.