Hello R-user, sorry for this very off-topic question. But I shall present R to my dept. (pro's and con's and what it can do). The pro's and con's are easy but not what R can do (additional to the "normal" statistics). I looked through the packages, but the enormous amount of packages makes it very difficult for me to decide which one is worth mentioning. I used only a small part of all R packages (mainly recommended packages and grasper) and would like to know which package for ecologist has to be mentioned. I would greatly appreciate if you can tell me which packages you think are very useful for ecolgical research in R e.g. vegan, ade4, ... thanks in advance, regards Martin
Definitely take a look at WiSP. http://www.ruwpa.st-and.ac.uk/estimating.abundance/WiSP/ Mark ========================================= Mark Herzog Post Doctoral Researcher Dept. of Natural Resources and Environmental Science University of Nevada Reno Reno, NV 89512 (775) 784-6984 (office) (775) 784-4583 (fax) mherzog at unr.edu ========================================= -----Original Message----- From: Martin Wegmann [mailto:mailinglist2_wegmann at web.de] Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 12:26 PM To: R-list Subject: [R] packages for ecologists Hello R-user, sorry for this very off-topic question. But I shall present R to my dept. (pro's and con's and what it can do). The pro's and con's are easy but not what R can do (additional to the "normal" statistics). I looked through the packages, but the enormous amount of packages makes it very difficult for me to decide which one is worth mentioning. I used only a small part of all R packages (mainly recommended packages and grasper) and would like to know which package for ecologist has to be mentioned. I would greatly appreciate if you can tell me which packages you think are very useful for ecolgical research in R e.g. vegan, ade4, ... thanks in advance, regards Martin ______________________________________________ R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
A 21:26 09/12/2003 +0100, Martin Wegmann a ?crit:>Hello R-user, > >sorry for this very off-topic question. > >But I shall present R to my dept. (pro's and con's and what it can do). >The pro's and con's are easy but not what R can do (additional to the >"normal" >statistics). >I looked through the packages, but the enormous amount of packages makes it >very difficult for me to decide which one is worth mentioning. > >I used only a small part of all R packages (mainly recommended packages and >grasper) and would like to know which package for ecologist has to be >mentioned. > >I would greatly appreciate if you can tell me which packages you think are >very useful for ecolgical research in R e.g. vegan, ade4, ... > >thanks in advance, regards MartinI do not think this is the right way to present R. R is not a simple tool box where you input some data and have a battery of results after applying some standard, pre-defined methods. It is better to think the other way: think about what you want to do with your data, then see if the necessary methods are already implemented in R, and if not they can be. Writting functions in R is quite easy compared to other languages. Seeing things this way implies a major change in our views of data analysis in fields like ecology and evolutionary biology. The R project has many tools to help here: there is ample documentation to help in writting functions and packages; there are several search engines to browse through the list of packages and the documentation (with links from the CRAN site). I find this view of data analysis with R much more challenging than the traditional "passive" approach. And do not forget that R is a collaborative project. As a package maintainer I always welcome even simple suggestions, and I must mention that the R Core Team readily accepts suggestions too. I think these aspects have to be pointed out rather than a mere list of packages and functions. Emmanuel Paradis