Treebase is a great resource for phylogenetic trees, and has a nice interface for searching for certain types of trees. However, if you want to simply download a lot of trees for analyses (like that in Davies et al.), then you want to be able to access...

So perhaps you have all figured this out already, but I was excited to figure out how to finally neatly get all the data frames, lists, vectors, etc. out of a nested list. It is as easy as nesting calls to the apply family of functions, in the case bel...

Here is some code to run Phylip's contrast application from R and get the output within R to easily manipulate yourself. Importantly, the code is written specifically for trait pairs only as the regular expression work in the code specifically grabs da...

I wrote earlier about some code I wrote for running Phylometa (software to do phylogenetic meta-analysis) from R.I have been concerned about what exactly is the right penalty for including phylogeny in a meta-analysis. E.g.: AIC is calculated from Q in...

Here is an approach for comparing two methods of adjusting branch lengths on trees: bladj in the program Phylocom and a fxn written by Gene Hunt at the Smithsonian.Get the code and example files here: http://wp.me/PRT1F-2vGet phylocom here: http:/...

A while back I posted some messy code to run Phylometa from R, especially useful for processing the output data from Phylometa which is not easily done. The code is still quite messy, but it should work now. I have run the code with tens of different d...

I posted last week a simple function to plot networks using ggplot2 package. Here is version 2. I still need to work on figuring out efficient vertex placement.Changes in version 2:-You have one of three options: use an igraph object, a matrix, or a da...

I have been looking around on the web and have not found anything yet related to using ggplot2 for making graphs/networks. I put together a few functions to make very simple graphs. The bipartite function especially is not ideal, as of course we only w...

I have up to recently always done my phenotypic selection analyses in SAS. I finally got some code I think works to do everything SAS would do. Feedback much appreciated!########################Selection analyses#############################install.pac...

A recent survey reported in Science ("Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, but not in the Classroom"),  suggests that high school teachers are not teaching evolution to the fullest extent, say, that grammar is being taught in the English c...

Excel pivot tables have been how I have reorganized data...up until now. These are just a couple of examples why R is superior to Excel for reorganizing data:################ Good riddance to pivot tables ############library(reshape2)library(plyr)&nbsp...

I recently gathered fish harvest data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administarion (NOAA), which I downloaded from Infochimps. The data is fish harvest by weight and value, by species for 21 years, from 1985 to 2005. Here is a link to a google document of the data I used below: ...

Wikispeedia is a website trying to gather all speed limit signs on Earth.  I recently created a Google Visualization for some of their data, specifically on speed limit signs that change speed throughout the day.Check it out here: http://grou...

Earlier, I posted about generating networks from abundance distributions that you specify. If this post was interesting, check out Jeff Kilpatrick's website, where he provides code he produced in R and Octave to compare real bipartite networks to ones ...

Okay, so this isn't ecology related at all, but I like exploring data sets. So here goes...Propublica has some awesome data sets available at their website: http://www.propublica.org/tools/I played around with their data set on Recovery.gov (see hyperl...

R interfaces with the powerful Google Visualization API with the package googleVis (see here). It's relatively easy to convert your graphics in R to interactive graphics to post on a web browser. And the graphics are quite nice, as seen below in a simple graph of some of my data ...

Another grad student and I tried recently to make a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between ecological network structure (e.g., nestedness) and community structure (e.g., evenness)......Alas, I had no luck making new insights. How...

Anthony Ives, of University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Matthew Helmus of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, present a new statistical method for analyzing phylogenetic community structure in an early view paper in Ecological Monographs. See th...

Here is some code to run Phylometa from R. Phylometa is a program that conducts phylogenetic meta-analyses. The great advantage of the approach below is that you can easily run Phylometa from R, and manipulate the output from Phylometa in R. Phylometa ...