Provides an interface to the Qhull program that allows ecologists to easily calculate the convex hull volume (CHV) metric of functional diversity and do tests against null models. For a description of the method see [Cornwell et al 2006]
Author: Dylan Schwilk
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 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
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).
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.
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.
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).
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
[Cornwell et al 2006]: Cornwell, W.K, D.W. Schwilk and D.D. Ackerly. 2006. A trait-based test for habitat filtering: convex hull volume. Ecology 87: 1465--1471.