Dr Ben Maslen

Ecological Statistics and Data Science Lecturer

About me

I am a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales. My research sits at the intersection of statistics, artificial intelligence, and ecology, with a focus on developing methods that help ecologists monitor, assess and protect the natural environment. I work particularly with remote underwater video, ecological abundance data and multivariate study design, aiming to turn complex environmental data into reliable evidence for biodiversity monitoring and decision-making.

I completed my PhD in Statistics at UNSW and CSIRO Data61 in 2025, where I developed statistical and AI methods for ecological monitoring. This work included movement-aware object detection for underwater video, the assessment of methods used to analyse these videos, and the development of a novel means to estimating fish abundance while accounting for imperfect detection using distance sampling. I have also developed a power-analysis tool to answer study design questions when collecting multivariate ecological data with an accompanying R package ecopower, which has been downloaded 14,527 times from CRAN.

Before becoming a Lecturer, I worked for more than six years as a Statistical Consultant at UNSW Stats Central, supporting researchers and Higher Degree Research students with study design, statistical modelling and analysis. Across my research, teaching and consulting, I collaborate with ecologists, environmental scientists, other statisticians and data scientists to develop practical, reproducible methods that contribute to environmental resilience.

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