[R] packages for ecologists

[Emmanuel Paradis]

A 21:26 09/12/2003 +0100, Martin Wegmann a écrit:
>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

I 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