Hi Jacqueline, The software R that was mentioned is very powerful, but I would hesitate to use it for undergraduates. For the type of exercise you describe I have used a combination of Microsoft Excel coupled with the PopTools add-on by Greg Hood:
http://www.cse.csiro.au/poptools/ It does all the life table to projection model conversions you could ask for. It works with Excel 2007 as well. good luck, Drew Tyre School of Natural Resources University of Nebraska-Lincoln 416 Hardin Hall, East Campus 3310 Holdrege Street Lincoln, NE 68583-0974 phone: +1 402 472 4054 fax: +1 402 472 2946 email: [email protected] http://snr.unl.edu/tyre "Schlosser Jacqueline (seal)" <[email protected]> Sent by: "Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news" <[email protected]> 02/05/2009 11:17 AM Please respond to "Schlosser Jacqueline (seal)" <[email protected]> To [email protected] cc Subject [ECOLOG-L] Freeware for undergrad ecology course? Dear Ecologger I'm looking for a free and easy to use software to use in my ecology course. For one lab exercice, my students have to fill in cohort tables (survivorship, mortality, fecundity etc.) to draw different survivorship curves. To make this exercice more interesting and applied, I'd like to find a program that would allow the students to enter this data and get a graph back, that shows them the popultation increas/decrease over the next 100-200 years. With this program they could play with the data and see what implications different management decisions (ie protecting early life stage vs. late life stages) would have for this population. Does anyone know of such a free/shareware? I appreciate your help. Sincerely, __________________________________________________ Jacqueline Schlosser, Ph.D. ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences Institut of Natural Resource Sciences Gruental, Postfach 335 CH-8820 Wadenswil Telefon +41 (0)58 934 5792 Fax +41 (0)58 934 5853 www.cascadesystems.ch www.unr.ch www.lsfm.zhaw.ch
