A few quick things to add to this thread. I have found two R packages particularly helpful for multivariate analysis of ecological data. For others see the CRAN Task View: Multivariate Statistics at:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Multivariate.html Vegan is great! It is very well maintained has very good documentation and some nice tutorials (called Vignettes in R speak), They can be found at: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/vegan/index.html I have found the 'Introduction to ordination in vegan' particularly helpful. I also like the labdsv package for classification methods. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/labdsv/index.html Some labs using this package can be found here: http://ecology.msu.montana.edu/labdsv/R/ Good luck, Michael Michael Denslow Graduate Student I.W. Carpenter Jr. Herbarium [BOON] Department of Biology Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina U.S.A. -- AND -- Communications Manager Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections sernec.org
