Zoology. Statistics. R. Welcome to ZooStaR. Let’s begin. Statistical tests are crucial to the natural sciences – they can make our observations solid. Robust. Defensible. Unfortunately, we as natural science students often focus our efforts on learning the biology or ecology of an organism, and when we need to apply a statistical method, we may find the variety of tests overwhelming, the statistical language inaccessible, or the instructions on how to implement the tests obscure.
“…do I need a t-test or a principal component analysis, and how do I do either?..“
“…I couldn’t care less about the minutiae of the test, I just want to know that I am using the right one for my data…“
What would help would be clear set of instructions and free, open-access software to do all of the analyses in. R is a large part of the answer – it is a free, powerful tool that you can use for [probably] all of your statistical tests. The ZooStaR initiative is a series of videos that will teach you how to use R for statistical analyses.
The Decision Tree (to grow over time)
Work through the Decision Tree below to find the ZooStaR episode you need. You will find links to the ZooStaR episodes at the bottom of this page.
ZooStaR episodes
(If the fullscreen button is not showing on the videos, then you can click on the ‘Watch on Youtube.com” button and head over to Youtube to see the videos in fullscreen.)
Illuminating Fossils 
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