R in Ecology

My sense is that ecology tends to have more on spatial covariance (along with epidemiology), psychology on building scales out of latent factor models, and economics on temporal covariance.

(although there is substantial overlap between the three)

It's also worth mentioning that a lot of fields that you wouldn't normally think of as ecology use ecological tools like the vegan package. A good example is studies of the human microbiome. Studying the microbiome you want to measure the biodiversity of various samples from diseased and healthy individuals -- which is basically the same problem as traditional ecologists face when looking at, say, a polluted versus pristine environment.

Agreed. The `raw` data collection should be transparent and in a format that is not locked into Excel spreadsheets.

That's why programs like Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry, mentioned in the article, are so important. http://www.datacarpentry.org. Most universities actually don't have good opportunities for active researchers (graduate students, postdocs, professors, research staff) to learn programming or effective data skills. But, researchers are really looking to learn the skills. https://www.embl-abr.org.au/news/braembl-community-survey-re... DC and SWC help fill that gap by teaching two-day hands-on workshops that meet researchers where they are to give them the skills and perspectives to get out of spreadsheets and into R and Python.