CHAPTER 12 Final Remarks There are a number of books available describing interesting applications of statistics in environmental science. The book series Statistics in the Environment is a good starting point because it contains papers arising from conferences with different themes covering environmental monitoring, pollution and contamination, climate change and meteorology, water resources, fisheries and forestry, radiation, and air quality (Barnett and Turkman, 1993, 1994, 1997). Further examples of applications are also provided by Fletcher and Manly (1994), Fletcher et al. (1998), and Nychka et al. (1998). For more details about statistical methods in general, the handbook edited by Patil and Rao (1994) or the Encyclopedia of Environmetrics (El-Shaarawi and Piegorsch, 2001) are good general references. There are several journals that specialize in publishing papers on applications of statistics in environmental science, with the most important being Environmetrics, Ecological and Environmental Statistics, and The Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics. In addition, journals on environmental management frequently contain papers on statistical methods. It is always risky to attempt to forecast the development of a subject area. No doubt new statistical methods will continue to be proposed in all of the areas discussed in this book, but it does seem that the design and analysis of monitoring schemes, time series analysis, and spatial data analysis will receive particular attention as far as research is concerned. In particular, approaches for handling temporal and spatial variation at the same time are still in the early stages of development. One important topic that has not been discussed in this book is the handling of the massive multivariate data sets that can be produced by automated recording devices. Often the question is how to reduce the data set to a smaller (but still very large) set that can be analysed by standard statistical methods. There are many future challenges for the statistics profession in learning how to handle the problems involved (Manly, 2000). © 2001 by Chapman & Hall/CRC . Environmetrics, Ecological and Environmental Statistics, and The Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics. In addition, journals on environmental management frequently contain. themes covering environmental monitoring, pollution and contamination, climate change and meteorology, water resources, fisheries and forestry, radiation, and air quality (Barnett and Turkman, 1993,. CHAPTER 12 Final Remarks There are a number of books available describing interesting applications of statistics in environmental science. The book series Statistics in the