It was always my hope that the Fisheries Stock Assessment (FSA) R package would become a community endeavor. With the recent release on CRAN of v0.8.21 that hope has finally come to fruition. This version has two new co-authors.

Alexis Dinno is the author of the dunn.test package. The dunnTest() function in FSA is simply a wrapper for dunn.test() in her package. In other words, the foundational “guts” of dunnTest() were written by Alexis. This has been acknowledged in the last several versions of FSA, but by including Alexis as a co-author on FSA she will finally get some credit whenever FSA is cited for dunnTest().

Powell Wheeler is a fisheries biologist in North Carolina who expanded removal() in FSA by coding the “Burnham method” as implemented in the popular (but compiled and commercial) MicroFish software. Adding this functionality to FSA has been on my “to-do list” since receiving a query for it from biologists in Idaho a few years ago. It now finally exists in FSA, thanks to Powell’s good work.

Check out the new version of FSA, welcome Alexis and Powell, and thank them for their important contributions to FSA.

If you have something to contribute to FSA, please contact me.