Ecoinformatics is considered a sub-discipline of bioinformatics and its goal is to create and expand software tools to manage, manipulate, store and distribute ecological information. Applications developed in ecoinformatics are quite practical in ecological data analysis, particularly in vegetation ecology. Vegetation ecologists are familiar with the challenges of analyzing large data sets, so ecoinformatics is a good tool to improve the problem-solving process. It is possible to automate much of the data analysis step and introduce higher levels of quality control. Software programs like R and Kepler are quite suitable for these purposes. Both are open source computer applications and may be used either alone or in an integrated manner. R is used by many biologists for statistical analysis, while Kepler is designed to automate the dataflow process. Both are userfriendly, and may be easily interfaced. These software applications have been used for certain types of diversity and community data managing projects. Here I present an example of models developed for specific types of data analysis in vegetation ecology.
In order to use the model developed for this project, one needs only supply a standard data set in spreadsheet format as input. The application automatically generates output with general necessary abundance estimates. Two models were developed for different types of plant community data. I expect a broad range for future applications of these models in both research and teaching.