Statistics for Ecologists – Support Index and Overview

Welcome to the support pages for Statistics for Ecologists. These pages provide information and support material for the book. You should be able to find an outline and table of contents as well as support data files and additional material.

This is a book about the scientific process and how you apply it to data in ecology. You will learn how to plan for data collection, how to assemble data, how to analyze data and finally how to present the results. The book uses Microsoft Excel and the powerful Open Source R program to carry out data handling as well as producing graphs.

Statistics help you make sense of data, which is generated in all branches of science. Ecology is a wide-ranging and important science, which helps our understanding of the natural world.

Students of ecology and environmental science will find this book aimed at them although many other scientists will find the text useful as the principles and data analysis are the same in many disciplines. No prior knowledge is assumed and the reader can develop their skills up to degree level.

• How to plan ecological projects.
• How to record and assemble your data.
• How to use Excel for data analysis and graphs.
• How to use R for data analysis and graphs.
• How to carry out a wide range of statistical analyses including analysis of variance and regression.
• How to create professional looking graphs.
• How to present your results.

• Completely revised chapter on graphics.
• Chapter on basic community statistics, biodiversity and similarity.
• Chapter summaries.
• End of chapter exercises

The book follows the theme of the scientific process and is split into four broad themes:

• Planning
• Data Recording
• Data Exploration
• Reporting Results

The sections are rather uneven in size and focus on the analysis side somewhat. The section on reporting also covers presentation of analyses (e.g. graphs). Although the emphasis is on ecological work and many of the data examples are of that sort, I hope that other scientists and students of other disciplines will see relevance to what they do.

Here are the main chapter headings:

Go to the Outline/TOC page for fuller details, including: main Chapter and Section headings along with a few notes about the contents of each chapter/section.

There are many data files used to demonstrate or illustrate various principles and analytical tasks. Some files are Excel (or CSV) and some are R-format. There are two archive files:

• RData – this will load into R and contains all the R-format data.
• S4E2e Archive Excel.zip – this contains Excel and CSV files (which open in your spreadsheet).

The Example Data support page gives more details about the data resources.

See our sister site, DataAnalytics: Ecology Matters, for resources for Ecology Students & Teachers. Including: data examples to use for practise and demonstration, and Custom Functions for R: The Statistical Programming Language.

There are many items I would have liked to add to the text but which would have made the book too unwieldy. I decided it would be best to put these extra things onto the support website.

Some of the items are additional notes and information that relate to a particular topic. Others are more detailed exercises that you can follow using additional data.

Visit the exercises support page for more details and links to the exercises and notes.

See our sister site, DataAnalytics: Ecology Matters, for resources for Ecology Students & Teachers. Including: data examples to use for practise and demonstration, and Custom Functions for R: The Statistical Programming Language.