SC 12 - Quantitative Community Ecology in R

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Session Description: This short course is based on a popular course offered at ESA 2021 Annual Meeting. The participants will be introduced to fundamental and cutting-edge techniques in R that will enable them to answer important questions in community ecology. The course will cover both basic and intermediate multivariate methods, such as calculating a variety of community diversity metrics, distance and dissimilarity measures, transformations, ordination, clustering, indicator species analysis, tests for multivariate differences between groups, and data visualization. We will also demonstrate how you might integrate phylogenetic and spatial information for community analysis. Interspersing short lectures with break-out groups, participants will use data provided by the course leaders to solve analytical problems using R (https://www.r-project.org/), an open-source statistical software widely and increasingly used by ecologists. Participants will be exposed to a variety of R packages and functions, and all data files, code, and supporting documents will be made available prior to the short course to enhance learning. While no prior experience in R is required to attend, those participants with a basic statistical and community ecology background may find this course most beneficial. We recommend, and will provide, a short R tutorial prior to attending for all participants who have not used R previously.