Abstract

Statistics is used in all scientific disciplines. Researches on ecology, natural resources, and engineering use statistical software packages for conducting their statistical analysis. We briefly review two statistical software packages most often used in ecological and engineering studies, SPSS and SAS, and compare them with the free statistical software R. We recommend the use of R for problems in ecology and engineering in Latinoamerica and third world countries, not only because it is a free, top shelf statistical software, but also because it offers a greater control of how each procedure is performed, thorough and widely available documentation, and a computing environment both suitable for statistics as well as for many quantitative areas in several disciplines.