coding with R

Post date: Jul 27, 2013 2:56:47 AM

Lately, the History of Life interns have been working on our final projects to present at the AGU conference. This week has been full of using the statistical program, R and collecting ostracod data. We have diligently been working on our project, trying to see whether Bergmann’s rule, which states that the size of an organism increases as the temperature decreases, or Cope’s rule, which states that the size an organism just increases over time, becomes dominant in a particular species. We are looking at the class echinoidea, which includes sea urchins and sand dollars during the Mesozoic Era.

We chose the Mesozoic because Echinoids were flourishing and that era, from 252-66 mya, was experiencing varied types of climate: hot, cold, mild, everything possible! Since we are looking at temperature and body size, we thought that the influx of temperatures would show a diverse amount of data. After writing up our proposal and Noel approving it, we started working. It was a very long process.

First, we had to sort the data and pick out all the echinoids in Excel. Since CO₂ has a direct correlation to temperature (as CO₂ levels increase, temperature increases), we started graphing CO₂ and body lengths on R. I won’t tell you our results just yet—you’ll have to wait and see—but they are not what we expected! So we are still compiling more data, like latitude and longitude and we can’t wait to present!!

Here are some pictures of our code that’s like over 300 lines!!