JuliaCon 2018

Abstract
Ecological analysis draws upon many different tools - geographic, phylogenetic, bioinformatic and simulation packages and a wide range of statistics. Most ecologists use R, but its package ecosystem is severely fragmented. EcoJulia is a framework to bring cohesive ecological data analysis to Julia.
Description
Today’s ecologists rely increasingly on complex data analysis, and the ability to creatively define new analyses and design new computational tools has become a key component of ecological research. Ecologists generally rely on the R programming language for this, which has opened up exciting new possibilities, but also has inherent problems. Performance-critical functionality in R generally needs to be implemented in C or Fortran, making library code essentially a black box for scientific users. But more fundamentally there isn’t a strong culture for widespread collaboration on developing software tools in the ecological community, meaning that useful functionality is scattered across a fragmented package landscape.
Becaus of its combination of clear syntax and quick processing speed, Julia has the potential to solve these issues. Julia makes the development of efficient libraries easy for any researcher, and anyone familiar with the language can easily understand package code. But more importantly, Julia creates an opportunity to start from scratch, and develop a package ecosystem for ecology where different packages use the same types and interfaces.
We present the beginnings of such an infrastructure for ecological data analysis in Julia, that allows for an integrated and cohesive ecosystem of packages, without sacrificing the freedom of creating new packages with new implementations. We will also demonstrate the SpatialEcology package, which makes it easy to analyse ecological data in a split-apply-combine framework.