Short communicationThe package “adehabitat” for the R software: A tool for the analysis of space and habitat use by animals
Section snippets
The R software
Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, from the Auckland University, developed the R software to provide a statistical environment to their laboratory in 1992, and based this software on the S language. This one was invented at the AT&T Bell Laboratories by John Chambers and his colleagues during the mid-1970s. They wanted to encourage the user to “slide into programming, perhaps without noticing” (Chambers, 1998), and to ensure that a user can easily implement his own techniques.
With the help of
The “adehabitat” package
I have developed the “adehabitat” package to study the space use and habitat selection by wildlife. It contains about 100 functions giving tools frequently used in this field of research. The graphical possibilities of this package (Fig. 1), and the combination of the “adehabitat” functions with the powerful analysis environment provided by R allow the users to design a large diversity of analyses of the relationships between animals and their environment. A quick learning can be carried out
Discussion
The main objective of the “adehabitat” package is to provide tools for analyzing the relationships between animals and their environment. Because the R community is very active, the package is improved frequently, making new functions available to other users. Thus, since its first release in September 2004, two additional versions of the package have been submitted on CRAN as a result of the suggestions made by the users concerning the methods that would find their place in “adehabitat”. For
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the “Office national de la chasse et de la faune sauvage” for their financial support. I warmly thank Anne-Béatrice Dufour (University of Lyon, France) for her unvaluable comments on earlier drafts on this manuscript. I am also grateful to Mathieu Basille who programmed the ENFA and related functions for “adehabitat”, and suggested many improvements to bring to the package; to Daniel Chessel for his helpful advices about “good programming practice” and all the users who
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