Hello all,
Here is the summary of responses relating to literature request for MATLAB
software.
Thank you very much for all your responses.
Krishna
==========================
Original Question
Dear all,
I am looking for important books / literature on MATLAB (that use ecological
examples) specifically designed for ecologists.
=============
Responses recieved
=============
The below book is suggested by several experts, although little old and caution
towards changes in some of the basic commands in MATLAB.
Roughgarden J. 1998. "Primer of Ecological Theory." Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
=====================
Related literature and expertise
Don't know of any Ecology-MATLAB books, but you might look at MATLAB Recipes
for Earth Sciences by Trauth. You might also contact Richard Strauss at Texas
Tech -- he is a power-MATLAB user and posts a lot of ecological MATLAP scripts
on his website.
====================================================
Morris WF, Doak DF. 2002. "Quantitative Conservation Biology: Theory
and Practice of Population Viability Analysis." Sunderland, MA: Sinauer
Associates Inc. (http://www.sinauer.com/detail.php?id=5460).
It focuses on PVAs and other modeling methods, and includes lots of great
MATLAB code.
============
Hal Caswell called "Matrix Population Models: Construction, analysis, and
interpretation (2nd ed.)" published in 2001.
==================
Look for more information about Matlab's book search in the Ecolog-L files of
March 2004, week 2.
==================
Mathematical Methods in Biology (Allman and Rhodes) is good too - and
uses MATLAB code in its examples.
===================
Little elaborative and nice summary from one of the MATLAB expert
Joan Roughgardens Primer of Ecological Theory is written specifically with
MATLAB in mind. It is quasi-MATLAB tutorial in fact. It gives lines of code
in the text (in place of traditional equations in many instances). It focuses
more on getting things done in MATLAB than on the actual mathematics involved.
NB, MATLAB has been updated since she wrote the text so some syntax/functions
have changed (thinking specifically of fmin which was replaced by fminsearch),
but most of the code will still work. As a bonus, I think all of the code is
available on the accompanying CD-ROM, the publishers website, or directly from
Roughgarden.
The Morris and Doak book is pretty good if youre interested in PVA and general
matrix model type stuff. All of the actual MATLAB code, in addition to being
printed in the text, is freely available from the publisher to download. They
also make use of Excel and SAS, so some examples or techniques are illustrated
with Excel functions or SAS instead of MATLAB. They also provide some code to
generate certain types of random variables, which might be useful if you dont
pay for the Statistics toolbox add-on to MATLAB (not sure how good they are, it
may be better to adapt something from Numerical Recipes or something like that).
The best overall book, but potentially the least accessible to math-shy
ecologists and least specifically tied to MATLAB, is Hal Caswells Matrix
Population Modeling. It has a fairly broad focus and does contain useful bits
of code interspersed, but it doesnt hold your hand through analyses like
Roughgardens book. NB the first edition had Fortran code, I think. The 2nd
edition uses MATLAB.
=======================================================
Dr. Krishna Prasad Vadrevu Research Scientist 201 Thorne
Hall, Agroecosystem Management Program 1680 Madison Avenue, The Ohio State
University Wooster, OHIO, 44691-4096, USA Fax : 330-263-3686 Phone :
330-202-3539 Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates
starting at 1¢/min.
