About openDendro¶

Why It Exists¶

For decades, much of the software used in dendrochronology was written in Fortran and maintained by a very small number of volunteers. As computing moves on, those programs get harder to compile and harder to run. This is the "some random person in Nebraska" problem, after the xkcd cartoon. In our field the random person is Ed Cook.

xkcd 2347, Dependency: a tower of blocks labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" resting on one thin block labelled "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003"

openDendro started in 2021 to move that toolkit into open languages, spread the work of maintaining it across more people, and make it usable by anyone who works with tree-ring data, in or out of dendrochronology.

What It Includes¶

dplR, the R package.
dplPy, the Python package.
xDateR and iDetrend, apps for crossdating and detrending in a browser.
Learning to Love dplR, a free book.

All of it is open source and on GitHub.

How We Work¶

Judge a method by what it does to the data. The question for any step is its effect on the series and on the conclusions drawn from them.
Turn choices into arguments. Where a careful analyst could go either way, the choice is an argument with a default we can defend and documentation of what it trades.
Say what was done. Output records the settings used. A function does not quietly swap one method for another.
Fail loudly. When a method cannot be applied to a series, the software stops or warns and names the series.
Keep reading the source. COFECHA and ARSTAN are where these methods come from. We read them, cite them and credit the people who wrote them. We do not treat a difference from them as a defect. More on that.

People¶

Leads: Andy Bunn , Kevin Anchukaitis , Tyson Lee Swetnam and Ed Cook.

Developers: Ifeoluwa Ale and Michele Cosi .

dplR has had many contributors over the years. They are listed in the package's DESCRIPTION file.

Funding¶

openDendro is supported by the Paleoclimate program of the US National Science Foundation through awards 2054514, 2054515 and 2054516.

Citing¶

Software gets maintained when it gets cited. If openDendro tools are part of your work, please cite them.

dplR: run citation("dplR") in R.
dplPy: doi:10.5281/zenodo.22695105
openDendro: doi:10.5281/zenodo.6110787

License¶

The software is released under the GNU General Public License. Each repository has the details.

Contact¶

Write to openDendro@gmail.com, or open an issue on GitHub.