Emphasizing the inductive nature of statistical thinking, this book connects applied statistics to the environmental and ecological fields. It follows the general approach to solving a statistical modeling problem, covering model specification, parameter estimation, and model evaluation. The text explains how to conduct data analysis, discusses simulation for model checking, and presents multilevel regression models. The author uses many examples to illustrate the statistical models and presents R implementations of the models. The data sets and R scripts used in the book along with exercises and solutions are available online.