WK 7

Introduction to Community Data Analysis Using the vegan Package in R

The R statistical language has enjoyed wide and rapid adoption by many ecologists, and is used across many ecological subdisciplines for statistical analyses and the production of publication-quality figures.  For community ecologists using R, one of the most-used, and most-useful, add-on packages is vegan, which provides a wide range of functionality covering inter alia ordination, diversity analysis, and ecological simulation. This workshop will offer participants a practical introduction to some of the most useful functions available within vegan.  We will focus in particular on the use of NMDS as an ordination method and on how to visualize the results using related plotting tools. We will also cover between-group tests such as PERMANOVA.The workshop will assume that participants have a basic level of familiarity with working with data in R, including data import and basic indexing and subsetting. Participants that do not have this basic level of familiarity with R may want to take the Introduction to R workshop offered earlier by the same organizers.  Some familiarity with distance measures is recommended but not required as we will briefly cover data transformation, standardization and multivariate distance measures. All participants must bring their own laptop with R and RStudio (available free online for all platforms at rstudio.com) pre-installed. All data files and code for this workshop will be made publicly available on github.com, so participants as well as those unable to attend will have access to them as a resource. The organizers are expert users of vegan and include one of the maintainers of the package.