Vegan: R functions for vegetation ecologists

R is a free, open source stastical environment 'which is not unlike S-plus'. It can be downloaded freely for your operating system from the R archive site. More information, such as guides and FAQs, can be found on the same site or through the R home page. Those reading Finnish can get my R: opas ekologeille. R is so similar to S-plus that you can use S-plus documentation as well, so that perhaps one of the best book form introductions to R is Modern Applied Statistics with S-plus by Venables & Ripley (Springer, 1999). Vegan package is intended to help vegetation ecologists and other community ecologists to use R. It contains all major ordination methods, ecologically meaningful dissimilarity indices, tools to analysis of diversity, species richness and abundance models, plus numerous support functions.

Public Release Version

• link to vegan frontpage at CRAN: latest official release with binaries for Windows and MacOS X.
• Vegan tutorial (pdf file): First version of a tutorial of community ordination with R. This is a Sweave document and all output (including graphics) were generated by R when processing the Sweave source into LaTeX so that you should be able to repeat all analyses.
• FAQ First version of Frequently Asked Questions. This is intended to be non-technical, and really to answer to questions asked.

Development versions

Vegan development happens now at R Forge.

• Vegan home page is http://vegan.r-forge.r-project.org/.
• Install Windows or MacOS X binaries or source files through R-Forge from an R prompt: install.packages("vegan",repos="http://r-forge.r-project.org").
• ChangeLog at R-Forge. More detailed and up-to-date info can be found in vegan R-Forge.
• Vegan help web pages (links work only between vegan functions: links to other packages are broken).

Vegetation Science in R

Dave Roberts has excellent tutorials on using R/S-plus in vegetation and community analysis.

My brief lecture notes discuss vegetation analysis in R. Unfortunately they are not quite finished: The lectures are over for 2003, and I may not have motivation to correct and complete the notes before the next season.

Something completely different...

Yes, I like python, but here some external links related to `vegan':

• Vegan basics
• Vegan shopping
• Vegan singles
• With a grain of salt: This is my favourite brand.