The Baskett Lab: Theoretical evolutionary and community ecology applied to conservation biology
Research  ~  Links & Resources

Grants/Jobs

Writing/Presenting

Theoretical Biology


   Resources for theoretical ecology


Programming
Numerical Recipes in C: good for algorithms
Wolfram MathWorld: good for explanations of mathematical concepts
Resources for both Matlab and R:
Matlab intro and useful commands, R useful commands (created for courses in theoretical population biology)
An introduction to Matlab or R for dynamical models in biology (Ellner and Guckenheimer) [Note on 4/12/11: Steve Ellner's website indicates these as "temporarily down"; hopefully these great resources will return soon]
Matlab/R translation
Fast Matlab programming (note: the conecpt of "vectorization" applies to R as well):
Programming in R:

Teaching a theoretical ecology/theoretical population biology/population dynamics course and finding that the students have forgotten much of their algebra and calculus due to lack of use?  Here's a handout I created to provide a reminder of the most relevant basics: algCalc.pdf

LaTeX
LaTeX commands
BibTeX entries
Web of Science to BibTeX conversion
BibTeX style files for Ecology, American Naturalist, Ecology Letters, Journal of Ecology, and Oikos (under "Data and Other Files" - note the useful R help files too)
BibTeX and LaTeX style files for a number of ecology and evolution journals (including Ecology, Ecology Letters, Evolution, Genetics, JTB, PLoS, PNAS, Nature, and Science - note the long list of helpful LaTeX links as well)
Still can't find a BibTeX style file for the journal you're submitting to?  The makebst macro in custom-bib is an excellent resource for creating a .bst file, typically for use with natbib.sty.  The files I've created with this are:
gcb.bst for Global Change Biology
jxb.bst for the Journal of Experimental Biology
consbiol.bst for Conservation Biology -- this also needs \bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{}{} in the preamble.
All are posted as zip files, so decompress before using.  Also, be sure to include \usepackage{natbib} in the preamble.
Learning LaTeX by example (see the .tex file first)
Helpful LaTeX links
Writing in LaTeX but submitting to a journal that doesn't accept .tex or .pdf format?  There are a number of LaTeX/Word and LaTeX/rich text converters; I typically use latex2rtf

Summer programs

Just for fun
PhD Comics
The Mathematics Genealogy Project
Marine ecology genealogy
Programming in Matlab?  Running into problems?  Ask it "why".


Last updated February 2012