Data Analysis and Statistics for Geography, Environmental Science, and Engineering

xix

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the many students who took classes with me and used preliminary versions

of this material. Their questions and comments helped shape the contents and improve the presen-

tation. My sincere thanks to several students who have worked as teaching assistants for classes

taught with this material and helped improve successive drafts over the years, in particular H. Goetz

andK. Anderle who kindly made many suggestions. I would also like to thank the students whom

Ihave guided on how to process and analyze their thesis and dissertation research data. Working

with them provided insight about the type of methods that would be useful to cover in this textbook.

Many colleagues have been inspirational, to name just a few: T.W. Waller and K.L. Dickson,

of the UNT Environmental Science program (now emeritus faculty), M.A. Harwell (Harwell

Gentile& Associates, LC), D.L. Urban (Duke University), M. Ataroff and M. Ablan (Universidad

de LosAndes), and J. Raventós (Universidad de Alicante), and S. García-Iturbe (Edelca).

Many thanks to Irma Shagla-Britton, editor for environmental science and engineering at CRC

Press, who was enthusiastic from day one, and Laurie Schlags, project coordinator, who helped

immensely in the production process. Several reviewers provided excellent feedback that shaped the

nal version and approach of the manuscript.

Special thanks to my family and friends, who were so supportive and willing to postpone many

important things until I completed this project. Last, but not least, I would like to say special thanks

to the open source community for making R such a wonderful tool for research and education.