Jussi Mäkinen

I am interested in spatial ecology, statistics and conservation. I have mostly worked with species distribution modeling with applications in conserving species habitats. Some nuances in that have been bringing machine learning and ecological theory together in modeling and applying decision analysis for using model predictions for conservation.

Before starting in Yale, I did my PhD at the University of Helsinki in Finland. There I studied Arctic marine mammals and their distributions along the Siberian Arctic coastline. There I worked with such themes as point process models and spatio-temporal random effects. As the final result, I predicted the mortality risks of marine mammals due to oil accidents in the Siberian Arctic.

In the future, I am interested in developing spatio-temporal and trait-based methods in species distribution models. Applying these to large scale data sets requires also considering the varying sampling effort.