From Swimming with Seagrasses to Statistics
Somewhere down the road ecology evolved from this: To something like this: As a member of the Seagrass Ecosystem Research lab here at Florida International University I am, by default, a researcher in two long-term monitoring projects. The first is the FCE-LTER seagrass monitoring project and the other is a seagrass monitoring project in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary . Both datasets have resulted in mounds and mounds of data throughout the years. As a side project to my dissertation I arrogantly decided to conquer said data mounds and turn out some ground-breaking revelations about benthic community structure in South Florida. There's just one problem: I am buried in MOUNDS of data! To analyze these data, it turned out, would be much more complicated than just getting the R code ( R is a stats program that hates me, but it's free so I put up with the abuse!) correct so the program will tell me what I want to know. Here is the first...