This code works with a dataset on the rare plant Synthyris bullii (formerly Besseya bullii), commonly called kittentails. The data comes from the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Plants of Concern Program, and includes data from 3 separate populations. To protect the state-threatened species, the coordinates of the populations were removed before data was shared. Running the code will briefly explore the data, calculate population growth metrics, test for density dependence, and then run a population viability analysis using a density independent model. Although the population of kittentails does exhibit negative density dependence, for the sake of time and more as an exercise in learning, the density indpendent PVA is sufficient.

Statistic summary for Iris dataset and linear model using sepal width to predict sepal length.

practice data