Workshop on Capacity Building in Cambodian Forestry
Introduction to Statistical Analysis in "R"
for Forest Resource Management

Background
      Forest resource management requires several periodic tasks including sampling, monitoring, statistical analysis, prediction and control of resource uses, planning and policy analysis on forest resource utilization. Through achieving these tasks, the management can be properly implemented and maintained for the society. Among them, the task of statistical analysis plays one of the important roles on developing ideas and insights of the management with the data obtained and accumulated over time and space. During last decades statistical methods have been advanced significantly along with advancement of computing power which can handle "Big Data" and "Baysean Method", while we as forest researchers have been busy working on monitoring and data collection to provide enough information of the current state of forest resources to the public. Combining the newly developed statistical methods and the data collected, it truly becomes possible to further integrate inference of models used for prediction and control of forest resource dynamics as well as market change on forest products. This also helps to manage forest resources more efficiently and effectively not only for timber production but also forests for global warming mitigation and biodiversity consideration and other related concerns.

Aims
      The main aim of this workshop is to provide lectures on the use of free statistical software called "R" to participants so that they would be able to handle their own data for statistical analysis in the forestry area by themselves. Since "R" is free software, everyone can easily access to it and use it without any cost. This is a big advantage of "R". Although it is not as use-friendly as other commercial software, as most professional statisticians use it is much more powerful and flexible for statistical analysis than the others. Once they become acquainted with the know-how of "R", they will realize the usefulness and powerfulness of "R". With the tutors who have used "R", it is much easier for the participants to start using "R". We also try to deliver our knowledge on forest management with R for statistical analysis.

From R Web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language))
      "R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians for developing statistical software and data analysis. R provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques, including linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, and others. R is easily extensible through functions and extensions, and the R community is noted for its active contributions in terms of packages."