Carl Boettiger, a graduate student at UC Davis, just got two packages on CRAN.  One is treebase, which which handshakes with the Treebase API.  The other is rfishbase, which connects with the Fishbase, although I believe just scrapes XML cont...

Tom Miller (a prof here at Rice) and Brian Inouye have a paper out in Ecology (paper, appendices) that confronts two-sex models of dispersal with empirical data.They conducted the first confrontation of two-sex demographic models with empirical data on...

So, there is a new food web dataset out that was put in Ecological Archives here, and I thought I would play with it. The food web is from Otago Harbour, an intertidal mudflat ecosystem in New Zealand. The web contains 180 nodes, with 1,924 links. Fu...

So, I've blogged about this topic before, way back on 5 Jan this year.Matt Helmus, a postdoc in the Wootton lab at the University of Chicago, published a paper with Anthony Ives in Ecological Monographs this year (abstract here).  The paper addres...

Regular expressions are a powerful in any language to manipulate, search, etc. data. For example:__ fruit fruit[1] "apple" "banana" "pear" "pineapple"__ grep("a", fruit) # there is an ...

Rolf Lohaus, a Huxley postdoctoral fellow here in the EEB dept at Rice University, gave our R course a talk on basic visualizations in R this morning.Enjoy!

Here is a short intro R talk I gave today...for what it's worth...R Introduction View more presentations from schamber

The team at rOpenSci and I have been working on a wrapper for the USA National Phenology Network API. The following is a demo of some of the current possibilities. We will have more functions down the road. Get the publicly available code, and contribu...

There is an awesome position opening up for an assistant professor in systematics at the University of Vermont. Below is the announcement, and see the original post at the Distributed Ecology blog. Why is this related to R? One can do a lot of systemat...

Cloudnumbers and CRdata are two new cloud computing services.I tested the two services with a very simple script. The script simply creates a dataframe of 10000 numbers via rnorm, and assigns them to a factor of one of two levels (a or b). I then take ...

Have you ever wanted to search and fetch barcode data from Bold Systems?I am developing functions to interface with Bold from R. I just started, but hopefully folks will find it useful.The code is at Github here. The two functions are still very buggy,...

We just wrapped up the 2011 iEvoBio meeting. It was awesome! If you didn't go this year or last year, definitely think about going next year.Here is a list of the cool projects that were discussed at the meeting (apologies if I left some out):Vistrails...

The Public Libraries of Science (PLOS) has an API so that developers can create cool tools to access their data (including full text papers!!).Carl Boettiger at UC Davis and I are working on R functions that use the PLoS API. See our code on Githu...

I am writing some functions to acquire data from the OpenStates project, via their API. They have a great support community at Google Groups as well.On its face this post is not obviously about ecology or evolution, but well, our elected represent...

A new paper out in Ecology by Xiao and colleagues (in press, here) compares the use of log-transformation to non-linear regression for analyzing power-laws.They suggest that the error distribution should determine which method performs better. When you...

I am writing a set of functions to search ITIS for taxonomic information (more databases to come) and functions to fetch plant phylogenetic trees from Phylomatic. Code at github.Also, see the examples in the demos folder on the Github site above.

I wrote a simple function for plotting a phylogeny in ggplot2. However, it only handles a 3 species tree right now, as I haven't figured out how to generalize the approach to N species.Any ideas on how to improve this?

I had seen the function idata.frame in plyr before, but not really tested it. Here are a few comparisons of operations on normal data frames and immutable data frames. Immutable data frames don't work with the doBy package, but do work with aggregate i...

With all the packages (and beta stage groups of functions) for comparative phylogenetics in R (tested here: picante, geiger, ape, motmot, Liam Revell's functions), I was simply interested in which functions to use in cases where multiple functions exis...