Class: Theoretical Ecology

• First class meeting with Alan - see notes
• Readings (See notes):
  • Hastings (2008) "Editorial – an ecological theory journal at last"
  • Kareiva (1989) "Renewing the dialogue between theory and experiments in population ecology"
  • Scheiner and Willing (2008) A general theory of ecology

Process - Kintr

• Installed and learned the knitr package. Looks like a great way to write literate code more easily
• Easy enough to process Multimarkdown, but if processing MMD to Latex/PDF, want to put knitr between the LaTeX and PDF for better processing. Right now this workflow is broken - need to fix my LaTeX compilation script
• Had to install updates for R and RStudio

Pollen

• Installed stratigraph package and explored it. Good functions for input/output from GPD datafiles, but the plotting functions are broken.
• Wrote function to convert count data to %Arboreal pollen data
• Downloaded GPD data, but should modify code so that it draws directly from the GPD FTP site
• GPD index is is odd form - need to write function to process and lookup sites
• Code and data on github