Understanding Environmental Processes

Environmental data are often collected across large geographic areas and exhibit complex spatial patterns. My research develops statistical models that help scientists understand these patterns and make predictions about environmental change.

Recent work has included mapping soil carbon across the United States and developing statistical tools for evaluating soil health, understanding the distribution of different phytoplankton species and their interaction with the environment, and understanding the changing patterns of seasonal snow presence.

Students working in this area may collaborate with environmental scientists and will learn methods for analyzing large spatial datasets.

Selected publications

• Pawl, E., Ribalet, F., Parker, P.A., and Hyun, S. (2026+) Mixtures of Neural Network Experts with Application to Phytoplankton Flow Cytometry Data.
• Wang, Q., Parker, P.A., Lund R., and Woody, J. (2026+) A Spatio-Temporal Study of Planetary Snow Presence Trends.
• Kei, Y.L., Wang, Q., Parker, P.A., Ribalet, F., Hyun, S. (2026+) Change Point Detection for Cell Populations Measured via Flow Cytometry.
• Veum, K.S., Parker, P.A., Holan, S.H., Pais, N., Wills, S.A., Amsili, J.P., van Es, H.M., Nunes, M.R., Seybold, C.A., and Karlen, D.L. (2025) Spatially Explicit Heteroskedastic Modeling for the Soil Health Assessment Protocol and Evaluation (SHAPE) version 1.0S. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 89(3), e70065.
• Parker, P.A. and Sansó, B. (2025) A Heterogeneous Spatial Model for Soil Carbon Mapping of the Contiguous United States Using VNIR Spectra. Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, Special Issue on ``New Perspectives in Statistics, Data Science and Econometrics for Agriculture, Land Use and Forestry”, 30(2), 517-539.
• Nunes, M.R., Veum, K.S., Parker, P.A., Holan, S.H., Amsili, J.P., van Es, H.M., Wills, S.A., Seybold, C.A., and Karlen, D.L. (2024) SHAPEv1.0 Scoring Curves and Peer Group Benchmarks for Dynamic Soil Health Indicators. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 88, 858–875, https://doi.org/10.1002/saj2.20668.
• Vedensky, D., Parker, P.A., and Holan, S.H. (2023) A Look Into the Problem of Preferential Sampling Through the Lens of Survey Statistics. The American Statistician, 77(3), 313-322.
• Nunes, M.R., Veum, K.S., Parker, P.A., Holan, S.H., Karlen, D.L., Amsili, J.P., van Es, H.M., Wills, S.A, Seybold, C.A., and Moorman, T.B. (2021) The Soil Health Assessment Protocol and Evaluation Applied to Soil Organic C. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 85, 1196– 1213.
• Veum, K.S., Parker, P.A., Sudduth, K.A., and Holan, S.H., (2018) Predicting Profile Soil Properties with Reflectance Spectra via Bayesian Covariate Assisted External Parameter Orthogonalization. Sensors, 18, 3869, doi:10.3390/s18113869.