Application Of Computational Methods In Phylogenetic Analysis Of Microbial Ecology
Computational Methods is the use of mathematical and statistical tools to analyze data and come up with relevant conclusions. These methods have a lot of importance in the Phylogenetics area including providing proper understanding of the diversity, systematic and nomenclature of organisms. Phylogenetics is a broad area consisting of many subtopics which have a lot of relevance in our daily lives for instance microbial ecology. Microbial ecology also known as community ecology refers to the study of the interactions of microorganisms with their environment, each other, and plant and animal species. In this study, we are analyzing the distribution of different species of carabid beetles in various habitats in Boreal forest located in Finland using phylogenetic packages like picante, ape, tree, geiger, vegan and phylotools. These packages are available in CRAN. In the past years, the carabid beetles have been rare in the tropical forest due to patchy micro-distribution brought about by habitat fragmentation. This is the reason why we decided to conduct this study. In this paper, we use three methods to analyze the data, they are; Binary Recursive Partitioning, Phylogenetics Generalized Least Squares(PGLS) and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm. The results obtained from this study indicate the effectiveness of these methods and conclude that they are important in phylogenetic analysis of microbial ecology