Evolution

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 the abstract here. Up to now, most phylogenetic community structure papers have calculated metrics and used randomization tests to determine if observed metrics are different from random. The approach of Ives and Helmus fits models to observed data, instead of calculating single metrics. ...

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 was created by Marc Lajeunesse at University of South Florida, and is described in his 2009 AmNat paper. Phylometa can be downloaded free here. Save phylometa_fxn.R (get here) to your working directory. Then use the block of code below to call the functions within phylometa_fxn.R. ...

I am starting this blog not because I am a seasoned code writer, but because I am learning how to use R specifically for ecology and evolution, and figured many others might have the same questions I have. If I find cool solutions I will post them here for all to view, criticize, improve, etc.