Software

Quantitative Tools for Variance Explicit Ecology and Herbivory
Using herbivar to identify the statistical distribution of herbivory observed in a lab experiment deviates strongly from neutral expectations and an herbivory distribution observed in the field.

I write a lot of code for research and sometimes stumble across small methodological ideas that are not publishable. Because these things are sometimes useful to other people, I’ve made them available in my R packages.

I actively maintain the vmisc and herbivar packages available on GitHub. The vmisc package contains miscellaneous general purpose and specialized functions for modeling and package development. The herbivar package makes several methods used for analyzing variability in ecological data available. Currently, it supports fitting herbivory models to data using maximum likelihood estimation. It also contains several helper functions for comparing distributions and assessing model fit. In addition, using the imager infrastructure, the package supports automatic processing of leaf images, mostly in the context of leaf scans, that can retrieve rich within-leaf herbivory data.