Seeing the light from plant perspective.
Introducing a set of tools essential for plant photobiological data analysis: r4photobiology
These packages are developed for the open source program R to process spectral irradiance data required for quantification of radiation in photobiological research. Packages are developed by Pedro Aphalo from University of Helsinki, Department of Biosciences, division of Plant Biology.
These packages allow analysing data fast and with great accuracy. The Photobiology packages consist of definitions of classes, methods, operators and functions for use in photobiology and radiation meteorology and climatology. They enable calculation of effective (weighted) and not-weighted irradiances/doses, fluence rates, transmittance, reflectance, absorptance, absorbance and diverse ratios and other derived quantities from spectral data. Methods of wavelength interpolation and conversion between energy- and photon-based units as well as calculations related to solar angles and day length are included.
Find here more information about the packages.
The related handbook, “R for Photobiology - Theory and recipes for common calculations” (Pedro Aphalo, T. Matthew Robson and Titta Kotilainen) is available through Leanpub.
Besides the handbook and user guides that are associated with the packages in R, some tutorials how to use the packages are presented in the UV4Plants Bulletin. In the latest R4photobiology article functions that can be used to calculate the position of the sun and day and night lengths on a certain date and at a given geographical location are introduced.