Earth day was launched in 1970 in the aftermath of several environmental disasters in the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". It was designed to help raise awareness of environmental issues and has since grown into a global event. With this year's Earth Day taking out a particular urgency in light of the most recent UN Climate Report. But what goes into the scientific research that informs some this activism? What statistical tools are used to better understand the health of our environment. That's the focus of this episode of staffs and stories with guest Philip Dixon.

Philip Dixon is a professor of statistics at Iowa State University. Dixon research interests include developing and evaluating statistical methods to answer interesting biological questions. Some of his current projects are developing non-parametric estimates of prediction distributions, modeling physical activity data, and developing model-based visualizations of species composition data.