R (finally!)

Well, I finally did it -- I've starting using R for my statistical analyses. I've been thinking about making the switch for ages, but it really took a demonstrated need to kickstart it... in this case, I thought I'd want to conduct a quantile regression on the relationship between elevation and species richness for a dataset I'm working with.

In the end, I may not even go with that analysis (mostly because R has opened up other possibilities), but I'm so happy that I made the leap... next step, using the package "vegan" for multivariate analyses of environmental data, so that I'm freed from the constraints of using CANOCO, which is installed on a single PC in my lab.

Thinking of making the switch? Do it, but you'll probably find it easier if you have a good book for reference (such as Michael Crawley's "Statistics: An introduction using R") -- otherwise, you might be put off by the initial command line window, which just stares back at you :).