About This Site

This is the course website for BEE 4850/5850, Environmental Data Analysis and Simulation, taught at Cornell University in the Department of Biological & Environmental Engineering in Spring 2027.

The site is built with Quarto, and the source is available on GitHub. Corrections and suggestions are welcome — use the “Edit this page” or “Report an issue” links in the right margin, or open an issue directly.

Credit

Course materials are by Vivek Srikrishnan unless otherwise noted, and are licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. You are free to reuse and adapt them with attribution under the same license.

The site design derives from earlier offerings of this course and of BEE 4750/5750.

Several elements of the course’s structure are borrowed and adapted with thanks:

• The four-step generative loop that organizes the course is adapted from Richard McElreath’s Statistical Rethinking (doi:10.1201/9780429029608), without its Bayesian commitment.
• The homework assignment format — lettered sub-parts with individual point values, an agenda stating what is being practiced explicitly and implicitly, and instructions on the form of an answer — is adapted from Cosma Shalizi’s homework assignments for 36-401 and 36-402 at Carnegie Mellon.

Accessibility

If you encounter any part of this site that is inaccessible to you, please let me know at vs498@cornell.edu and I will fix it.