Nick,
> >Is anyone here using Stata in an ecological or
> >environmental field (eg Pollution studies) and do the tools
> >in Stata for analysing Survey sampling data offer something
> >valuable to the analysis of ecological data. Not everyone
> >has the skills or time to write an SPlus program - even if
> >it can be done.
>
> >Any way, I would be grateful if anyone can provide some
> >comments on this, and improve my understanding of Stata and
> >the use of its Survey Sampling routines.
>More specifically, I can't advise in detail on the usefulness of
>Stata's -svy- commands for looking at ecological monitoring.
>I would want to worry about their applicability to
>situations with strong spatial and temporal element. However,
>from what you say, these elements are often ignored in practice.
Thanks for the reply. Certainly your own field is an environmental one but fairly far removed from the area that I am asking about. I'm not sure about the spatial and temporal aspects I assumed that these would be corrected for by taking into account the lack of independence between variables. As you suggest these are important considerations.
Any way, thanks again. I shall keep on reading. I was just trying to short cut my reading a bit, and find out a bit more about Stata. I am surprised it isn't more popular in the ecological world as it seems to provide an excellent middle road between the serious hard work of SPlus or R and the less flexible systat, spss etc
Cheers,
Graham S
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