Pedro J. Aphalo

Published

2023-02-19

Modified

2024-07-12

I am a senior university lecturer in physiological plant ecology and principal investigator at the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme (OEB), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences of the University of Helsinki and member of the Viikki Plant Science Center (ViPS).

I am the leader of the research group Sensory and Physiological Ecology of Plants (SenPEP).

Mastodon

I have been using and teaching R, the free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, for more than 20 years. I am a researcher working in the field of sensory ecology of plants. I have been interested throughout my career in plants’ responses to light.

In my research group we have used R for general data analysis, as well as for plotting and calculations related to photobiology. We are also using R for the near-real time acquisition of light spectra, and time series of light spectra. As a result of all these activities I developed several R packages and published them through CRAN. I have also written books both on R and on photobiology.

I had a separate website for my research group’s activities (with contents that I am slowly transferring to its own section here) and I have a website with material related to photography and photography techniques. My scientific publications are listed at my ORCID profile.

I published my first website, The Plant Photobiology Notes, between 1995 and 2001. Initially it was hosted in the desktop PC in my office, the same I used everyday for other tasks. The site survived with minor updates, mostly deletion of broken links, until around 2009. In the meantime the URL changed two or three times when I changed jobs. Much of its contents are now outdated but the site was archived by the Wayback Machine and remains available. Most of the spectral data at the old site are now included in my R packages together with newer data.