Cheddar

Analysis and visualisation of food-web data in the R statistical modelling language. Cheddar contains reference implementations of a whole host of food-web plots and methods taken from more than 15 published papers.

Different views of the community of Tuesday Lake sampled in 1984. Each panel can be produced with one or two lines of code using Cheddar.

The package provides

• a flexible, well-defined representation of an ecological community together with functions that make data import easy and that detect many commonly-occurring errors,
• several high quality published food-web datasets,
• functions for computing and plotting a range of food-web and related statistics,
• functions that perform community-level manipulations such as lumping trophic species and reordering predation matrices, and
• support for collections of communities, allowing investigation into changes in community structure through time, across environmental gradients or resulting from experimental manipulation.

Cheddar is available on CRAN, and is hosted on GitHub. It has been referenced by more than 100 papers. You can watch a short video of Cheddar in action.

LN Hudson, R Emerson, G Jenkins, K Layer, ME Ledger, D Pichler, MSA Thompson, EJ O'Gorman, G Woodward, DC Reuman Cheddar - analysis and visualisation of ecological communities in R. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2013.