FDiversity
User Manual
Statistical software for the analysis of
functional diversity
Fernando Casanoves
Julio A. Di Rienzo
Laura Pla
Updated 05/2010
Casanoves, Fernando
User manual f-diversity: Statistical sofware for the analysis of functional
diversity / Fernando Casanoves; Julio A. Di Rienzo; Laura Pla.-1a ed. - Buenos
Aires: el autor, 2008.
Internet.
ISBN 978-987-05-5238-3
1. Biodiversidad. I. Di Rienzo, Julio A. II. Pla , Laura III. Título
CDD 333.95
The software and the User Manual is the result of the efforts of a multidisciplinary
team. Copyright owners are Julio A. Di Rienzo, Fernando Casanoves and Laura Pla.
The correct citation for the manual is as follows:
Casanoves, Fernando; Julio A. Di Rienzo and Laura Pla. (2008). User Manual
FDiversity: Statistical software for the analysis of functional diversity. First Edition,
Argentina
Link: www.fdiversity.nucleodiversus.org
The software this manual describes should be cited as follows:
Di Rienzo, Julio A.; Fernando Casanoves and Laura Pla (2008). FDiversity, version
2008. Cordoba, Argentina.
Link: www.fdiversity.nucleodiversus.org
(www.nucleodiversus.org).
FDiversity
Development FDiversity was partially supported by the Interamerican Institute for
Global Change Research, IAI (CRN-II 2015), which is supported by US National
Science Foundation (Grant GEO-0452325).
is a Diversus Project production
DiverSus
DiverSus
ii
Julio A. Di Rienzo is an Associate Professor of Statistics and
Biometry at the “Facultad de Ciencias Agropecuarias” at
Córdoba National University, Argentina. He is Chief Director
of the InfoStat team and is responsible for the R interface of
the FDiversity software (dirienzo@agro.uncor.edu).
Fernando Casanoves is Chair of the Biostatistics Unit at
“Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza”
(CATIE). In the past, he worked at the “Facultad de Ciencias
Agropecuarias” at Córdoba National University, Argentina.
He is a member of the InfoStat team (casanoves@catie.ac.cr).
Laura Pla is a Full Professor at Francisco de Miranda
National University, in Coro, Venezuela. Her main interests
are applied multivariate analysis and biodiversity. She has
contributed
Infostat’s
biodiversity index (laurapla@yahoo.com).
the application module
to
for
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INDEX
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1
Requirements............................................................................................................................... 1
Getting started ............................................................................................................................. 2
File menu .................................................................................................................................. 2
Edit menu .................................................................................................................................. 3
Data menu ................................................................................................................................. 3
Statistics menu .......................................................................................................................... 5
Analysis of an example ........................................................................................................... 11
Current measurement of functional diversity and its definitions ......................................... 21
Univariate approach ................................................................................................................ 21
Community Weighted Mean .............................................................................................................. 21
FDvar: Functional divergence (Mason et al. 2003) ......................................................................... 21
FRO: Functional regularity (Mouillot et al. 2005)........................................................................... 22
Multivariate approach ............................................................................................................. 24
FAD: Functional attribute diversity (Walker et al. 1999, 2002) ...................................................... 24
FD: Functional diversity based on dendrograms (Petchey & Gaston 2002, 2006, 2007; Podani &
Schmera 2006, 2007; Cianciaruso et al 2009) ................................................................................. 25
Q: Quadratic entropy (Rao 1982 and Pavoine et al. 2005) .............................................................. 27
Extended FD ..................................................................................................................................... 31
CHhV: Convex hull hyper-volume (Cornwell et al. 2006) ................................................................ 31
Multidimensional functional diversity indices (Villéger et al. 2008) ................................................ 32
FDis: Functional dispersion (Laliberté & Legendre 2009) .............................................................. 35
Taxonomic diversity index ..................................................................................................... 36
Richness (S) ...................................................................................................................................... 36
Shannon Index (H) ............................................................................................................................ 36
Eveness (E) ....................................................................................................................................... 37
Simpson Index (D) ............................................................................................................................ 37
References .................................................................................................................................. 38
Index of figures .......................................................................................................................... 42
R sources .................................................................................................................................... 43
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Introduction
FDiversity implements a user-friendly interface to open source routines for the
estimation and analysis of functional diversity indices. The open source platform is R
with an interface written in Delphi® using DCOM-R (a way to run R in the background,
due to Thomas Baier and Erich Neuwirth). DCOM-R is accessed via Delphi routines
written by Dieter Menne.
Requirements
In order for FDiversity to have access to R, DCOM and R must be previously installed
in your system. Follow the following steps:
a) Install DCOM 3.01B5 (if you have a previous version, uninstall it before to
proceed)
b) Install R-2.11.0 or later
c) Run R and install rscproxy library 1
d) Exit R
e) Install FDiversity using fdiversityinstaller.exe from URL:
www.fdiversity.nucleodiversus.org
Note: Use the DCOM y R versions suggested by the link provided with the instructions.
The current version of FDiversity has been en tested under Windows XP and Vista.
FDiversity requires the following R packages: proxy, mvtnorm, geometry, vegan, FD,
ade4, ape, gee, lattice, nlme and rscproxy. FDiversity will try to download these
1 In some Vista version you can experiment some trouble with the installation of rscproxy package. The
symptom is that when you try to install it, vista will show you a message giving you same options. No
matters the option you choose the installation of the package will fail. In that case enter CRAN, look for
and download manually the rscproxy zip file. Uncompress the folder and move or copy it to the
C:\Program Files\R\R-2.11.0\library\. Take care, when moving–coping the folder just to move the folder
containing the package files not a folder inside another folder that use to produce the unzip procedure.
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packages (except rscproxy that must be installed before running FDiversity) upon
request by the procedures.
Getting started
When FDiversity is run, the application window is displayed as shown in Figure 1. The
illustration shows the application desktop with a new data table. The main menu has
two important items, Data and Statistics. A short description of each of the menus
follows.
Figure 1: Main FDiversity window
File menu
As usual, the file menu contains the list of actions for handling data sets, like creating a
new table or opening an existing one, saving, saving as, closing a table, and quitting the
application (Figure 2). The default file format that FDiversity uses to save tables is a
proprietary file format with an .FDDB extension. However, FDiversity can read Excel
files (*.xls), text files (*.txt, *.dat), dbase files (*.dbf), InfoStat files (*.idb, *.idb2) and
R scripts (*.r). It also has the ability to export data tables to all previously mentioned
data formats.
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Figure 2: FDiversity File menu
Edit menu
The edit menu shown in Figure 3 contains the usual links to the Cut-Copy-Paste-Undo
functions, common to almost every windows application. Copy with column names and
Paste with column names are specialized forms of copy-paste for application on tables.
Figure 3: FDiversity Edit menu
Data menu
This menu contains a list of links to procedures that apply to the current active table
(Figure 4). These procedures are intended to manage usual actions on a data sheets, such
as: inserting, adding and deleting rows and columns, arranging rows according to
different sorting criteria, activating and deactivating cases to allow or disallow
participation in calculations, changing columns names, modify the number of decimal
numbers displayed and the alignment and width of columns. It also contains links to
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more specialized procedures that allow categorizing numerical variables, editing the
names of categories of categorical variables, writing formulas and searching for cases
according to logical rules. Moreover, there are links to procedures on how to merge
tables side by side according to matching criteria (Merge horizontally) and on how to
merge tables appending one to the other (Merge vertically). Several transformations
are implemented to make trait scales comparable.
Figure 4: Data menu
Ecologists usually have two types of data sets involving the Functional Diversity
calculation: 1) a data set containing the trait’s information (i.e. specific leaf area, wood
density, longevity, leaf N content, etc.) for each species (cases), and 2) a data set
containing classification variables (treatment label, replications, plot number, etc.), co-
variables (altitude, temperature, etc.), the list of species, and the abundance or the basal
area corresponding to each species. Therefore it is useful to be able to concatenate
tables. It is easy to generate the merged data table using a side-by-side merging
algorithm (see the section Analysis of an example).
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