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 publication­quality figures. For community ecologists using R, one of the most­-used, and useful, add-­on packages is vegan, which provides a wide range of functionality covering inter alia ordination, diversity analysis, and ecological simulation. This workshop is envisioned as a follow­up to the "Introduction to vegan" session offered earlier or for those that already use vegan and want to delve into some of the detail. We will focus on vegan’s more advanced features, including the use of restricted permutations to test a range of experimental designs.

We will focus in particular on when and how to use multivariate methods including constrained ordination (CCA, RDA, Constrained PCoA), as well as between­group tests such as PERMANOVA. We will cover concepts such as design­ and model­-based permutations and the exchangeability of samples in tests. We will also discuss the use of vegan to go beyond simply fitting a constrained ordination model, to diagnostics, plotting, etc. The workshop will assume that participants have a basic level of familiarity with working in R (including data import and basic indexing and subsetting), with the use of basic functions in vegan, and with community ecology statistics, such as ordination. Participants should bring their own laptop with R, vegan, and RStudio (available free online for all platforms at www.rstudio.com) pre­-installed.