OStats Package available

Macrosystems Biodiversity team members Quentin Read, Arya Yue, Isadora Fluck, Benjamin Baiser, John M. Grady, Phoebe L. Zarnetske and Sydne Record have written a new R package ‘Ostats’. Version 0.1.0 is now published on CRAN as a stable public release! The most cutting-edge development version is always available on GitHub.

The Ostats package calculates “O-statistics,” overlap statistics that measure the degree of community-level trait overlap by fitting nonparametric kernel density functions to each species’ trait distribution and calculating their areas of overlap. The team first introduced O-statistics in their 2018 analysis of small mammal traits. This approach helps shed light on how individual-level trait variation determines the structure of communities of organisms and how they might respond to ongoing global changes.

Learn more about it in the new documentation website which includes tutorials on single-variable and multivariate O-statistics or check out the package’s source code on GitHub.