The lesson revolves are around a recently published study focused on saltmarsh restoration and the effects of non-native plant control on arthropod assemblages. The researchers conducted their research at wetland in coastal China that contains five different plant community types along an ecological gradient, ranging from native Phragmites to invasive Spartina monoculture and a restored Phragmites community. The study aims to determine whether removing invasive grass and restoring native plants can reverse the changes brought on by plant invasion.

The authors perform multiple statistical analyses as they try to answer several different research questions. We will focus our attention on the data and analyses related to arthropod diversity and abundance across the plant community gradient.

This lesson will guide you through the application of both parametric and non-parametric approaches to comparing means in order to determine whether or not there are statistically significant differences between groups with respect to a variable of interest. Along the way, you'll learn how to effectively explore and wrangle raw data and how to check that data conform to the expectations of parametric tests.Throughout the lesson there are opportunities for you to practice writing your own code, You'll learn about several ways that species diversity and abundance can be quantified, including the Shannon Diversity Index. You will also be introduced coding constructs and syntax that can be used to to more efficiently work with data, particularly when the same operation must be repeated over many columns in a table.

The lesson is divided into three parts, each contained in its own Markdown (.rmd) file:

1. Environmental background and focal paper introduction

2. Data wrangling

3. Analysis