Demographic analysis using the `popbio` library and some other fun stuff

(This article was first published on Noam Ross - R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) This week at the Davis R Users’ Group we had a great presentation by Kara Moore O’Leary on using the popbio package to examine rare plant demographics. The following is her script run through knitr. You can download the original script and associated data here. Find out more about Kara and her work at her website here Demographic analysis using the popbio library and some other fun stuff A population viability type analysis for a rare herbacious perennial plant, Penstemon albomarginatus, for its only remaining California population Objectives: Estimating the population growth rate - deterministic and stochastic methods Sensitivity and elasticity analysis - which transitions/rate are most variable, sensitive to change Projecting the population stochastically for different scenarios, observing variation in growth rate Quasi extinction probability Estimating vital rates from real data, which will never be as good/much the data that you would like to have for a PVA - some therapy for me, and maybe you too Load popbio and some other helpful libraries. I use the dropdown menu in RStudio to install libraries, it seems to work more consistently for my mac than [...]