The Q Package

Thank you for your interest in the Q Package. We have made some progress since 2002 and have produced a free R-language package that contains the same procedures as in the Q package, and much more. The new package is appended to the following paper and can be downloaded from the ESA Web page:

Durand, S., P. Legendre and S. K. Juniper. 2006. Sonar backscatter differentiation of dominant macrohabitat types in a hydrothermal vent field. Ecological Applications 16: 1421-1435.

You can also access the ESA Web page from our main web page

http://www.bio.umontreal.ca/legendre/indexEn.html

Go down to the section entitled R-language functions, then look for "sonarX".

Three of the functions found in "sonarX" have been updated since the publication of the paper. The main K-means partitioning function, "cascadeKM", is now part of the vegan R-language library, and new versions of rdaTest and "graph.rdaTest" are available on our main Web page.

This report compares various statistical procedures for sonar backscatter analysis

The Q Package was used in the following papers:

Legendre, P., K. E. Ellingsen, E. Bjørnbom & P. Casgrain. 2002. Acoustic seabed classification: improved statistical method. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 59 (7): 1085-1089.
Legendre, P. 2002. Acoustic seabed classification methodology: a user's statistical comparison. Report, Département de sciences biologiques, Université de Montréal. 17 pp.