proposal.md

Title of the session

Advanced community data analysis using the vegan package in R

Description of the session (appears online only; 250 words max.)

The R statistical language has enjoyed wide and rapid adoption by many ecologists, and is used across many ecological subdisciplines for statistical analyses and the production of publication-quality figures. For community ecologists using R, one of the most-used, and useful, add-on packages is vegan, which provides a wide range of functionality covering inter alia ordination, diversity analysis, and ecological simulation. This workshop is envisioned as a follow-up to the "Introduction to vegan" session offered earlier or one for those that already use vegan and want to delve into some of the detail. We will focus on vegan’s more advanced and recently released features, including the use of restricted permutations to test a range of experimental designs.

We will focus in particular on when and how to use multivariate methods including constrained ordination (CCA, RDA, Constrained PCoA), as well as between-group tests such as PERMANOVA. We will cover concepts such as design- and model-based permutations and the exchangeability of samples in tests. We will also discuss the use of vegan to go beyond simply fitting a constrained ordination model, to diagnostics, plotting, etc. The workshop will assume that participants have a basic level of familiarity with working in R, including data import and basic indexing and subsetting, with the use of basic functions in vegan, and with community ecology statistics, such as ordination. All participants must bring their own laptop with R and RStudio (available free online for all platforms at ) pre-installed.

Summary sentence (appears in print only; 50 word max.)

This workshop will provide participants with a hands-on opportunity to learn about and use functions within R's vegan package for analyzing ecological community data using constrained ordination and restricted permutation designs.

Name and contact information (affiliation, email) for the lead organizer and any co-organizers

Gavin L. Simpson
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9084-8413

Institute of Environmental Change and Society
University of Regina
3737 Wascana Parkway
Regina
Saskatchewan
Canada
S4S 0A2

Naupaka B. Zimmerman
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2168-6390

University of Arizona
1145 East 4th St.
Tucson,
AZ 85721
USA

Minimum and maximum number of participants (to assist in room assignment).

10 minimum, 30 maximum.

Requested scheduling

Sunday (August 7th) morning, 8:00--11:30am.

Any additional A/V equipment (standard A/V setup is a screen, LCD projector, and laptop)

We will need the standard setup, as well as wifi access for all participants.

Room set-up desired: theater, conference, hollow square, rounds, other

Classroom set-up or rounds. Good access to electricity is required for each table as participants will be using laptops throughout.

Food and beverage requests

No food or beverages requested.

Underwriting of workshop costs by a group or agency

None of the costs will be underwritten.

Is the session intended to be linked to a scientific session?

No.

Is the session intended to be linked to a business meeting or mixer?

No.

Describe any known (workshop/event) scheduling conflicts (what should it follow/precede/not conflict with?)

We request the Sunday morning time slot because

1. this workshop logically follows on from the Introduction to Vegan workshop proposed by Naupaka Zimmerman and myself, which we have requested for Saturday PM. This also allows particpants to take the proposed Introduction to R workshop on Saturday AM.
2. one of the organizers (Gavin Simpson) is also organizing the proposed workshop on mgcv on Saturday and attending the ESA Council meeting on Sunday PM.