ecocbo - Calculating Optimum Sampling Effort in Community Ecology

A system for calculating the optimal sampling effort, based on the ideas of "Ecological cost-benefit optimization" as developed by A. Underwood (1997, ISBN 0 521 55696 1). Data is obtained from simulated ecological communities with prep_data() which formats and arranges the initial data, and then the optimization follows the following procedure of four functions: (1) scompvar() calculates the variation components necessary for (2) sim_cbo() to calculate the optimal combination of number of sites and samples depending on either an economic budget or on a desired statistical accuracy. Additionally, (3) sim_beta() estimates statistical power and type 2 error by using Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance, and (6) plot_power() represents the results of the previous function.