Dear R-lister and Prof. Harrell, To Prof. Harrell: I feel very sorry to bothering you. The ecological data usually do not follow strictly-defined normal distribution. So, there are many more works before any parametric testing or any regression modeling-fitting . Tens of days ago, when I ask for proper methodology of outliers treatment in the data processing, Prof. Harrell ever adviced me to turn to nonparametric test. Since then, I put my efforts on setting up of my nonparametric test techniques. But, still now I can not gain any progresses on that. I was trained as evolutionary biologist (with background of genetics and ecology), without solid statistical trainnings, especially on nonparametric test techniques. And, I was educated in China where it is very hard to reach the statistician's supports. In the last five year, I have builded up a perfect (in my view) dataset which integrated genotype assignment, more 50 ecological and morphological traits, georeference of each sample (more than 1000 in total), and various of environmental parameter (gained by GIS searching in geoinformatic databases). Although I have much experiences on parametric statistics, I have not ultilized any noparametric statistics on my research except on some black-box softwares. I am thirst for any advice on non-parametric statistics on ecological data analysis. Is there any example-oriented books on that? How it can be implemented in R? Best regards, Yours Mao J-F [[alternative HTML version deleted]]