traithull
Program for calculating convex hull volume as a measure of functional diversity
Dylan Schwilk and William Cornwell
Traithull is a Python script that provides an interface to the Qhull program for calculating the volumes of convex hulls. Traithull provides functional diversity statistics to test for habitat filtering and limiting similarity (Cornwell, Schwilk and Ackerly 2006, Ecology).
================================ README: Traithull ================================ :Author: Dylan Schwilk :Contact: point@pricklysoft.org :Web Site::Date: $Date: 2007/12/14 16:42:18 $ :Version: $Revision: 1.4 $ Background ============ Traithull provides an interface to the Qhull program of Barber and Huhdanpaa (www.geom.umn.edu/software/qhull), which implements the Quickhull algorithm for calculating convex hulls. Traithull allows easy input of species trait and plot data and provides randomization output for testing null models of community assembly. Traithull is written in Python and requires Python version 2.3 or higher. Python is available for all platforms/operating systems (http://www.python.org) Traithull requires the qconvex executable from the qhull package. By default, Traithull expects this program to be in the path. You may also specify the location of qconvex on the traithull command line with the -q option. The Microsoft Windows zip package of traithull contains a copy of the qconvex.exe executable for windows Installation ============ Linux ----- Install QHull. On Debian-based Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc) this is the package "qhull-bin". So a simple "apt-get install qhull-bin" will work. Then unpack traithull and drop to a command line in the traithull dierctory. If you want to install traithull so that you can run the script from anywhere in your directory tree, copy traithull.py to a directory in your path (~/bin for one-user installation). Microsoft Windows ----------------- You need a working copy of QHull, specifically, make sure the qconvex.exe is in your path or working directory. If you download the windows zip file, it comes with qconvex.exe in the traithull directory. If you are not using the precompiled Microsoft Windows version, first you must install qhull and add it to your path. Then simply unpack traithull to a desired location. Mac --- You need a working python installation and a working qhull or at least the qconvex executable. If someone wants to write up specific instructions that would be great. Command-line usage ================== To obtain a summary of command line usage, enter the following at the shellcommand prompt: python traithull.py -h To run the sample plot and species data, copy the examples to the main traithull directory and type the following at the command prompt: python traithull.py -pplots.txt species.txt To produce random draws from the species pool, type python traithull.py species.txt You can of course leave the example input files in the examples directory and refer to them on the command line by path, eg examples/plots.txt (or examples\plots.txt on Microsoft windows). Command Summary ============== Output of "python traithull.py -h" Usage: traithull.py [options] [trait_file] Options: --version show program's version number and exit -h, --help show this help message and exit -p PLOTFILE, --plotfile=PLOTFILE File containing species occurance by plot -q QPATH, --qhull=QPATH path to qconvex executable -r REPLICATES, --randsample=REPLICATES Number of random samples per richness -d, --distance Output mean and variance of nearest-neighbor distances -a, --Aussie Output Aussie (Walker) fun. div. index -i, --individual Do each treat in matrix individually (1-dimensional version) -t, --total Output total species pool results -v, --verbose Verbose output Testing =======
Download: All platforms: traithull-0.7.tar.gz
Download: Windows version with pre-compiled Qhull: traithull-win-0.7.zip
