Vegan version 1.15-2 was submitted to CRAN on 15 April, 2009, and is now available for all supported platforms. This is a maintenance release which also ports some stable and safe feautures from the vegan development versions (upto 1.16-17).

The major new features are described in the NEWS file that is readable from the vegan front page in CRAN. After installing vegan, the NEWS file can be read from an R session with command

vegandocs("NEWS")

Completely new functions in this release are:

'contribdiv': Contribution diversity,

'dispindmorisita': Morisita index of dispersion,

'kendall.global': Kendall index to study significance of species associations.

'nestednodf': Nestedness index of overlap and decreasing fill (by Augusto Carvalho).

The following functions have major enhancements or fixes:

'adonis': uses less memory and can be used for larger problems. Changed the way P-values are evaluated as order statistics.

'beals': completely rewritten by Miquel de Caceres, and does no CV smoothing plus some extras.

'mrpp': returns within-class means, and estimates Classification strength if weight.type = 3 is used.

'ordisurf': can now do bubble plot or vary point sizes by the observed values of the fitted variable.

'procrustes' got a 'text' function.

'radfit': brokenstick model ('rad.null') failed with Gamma and Gaussian errors. The 'plot' function takes now 'log' argument allowing, e.g., log-log plots where the Zipf model is a straight line.

In addition, there are minor changes in 'anova.cca' with 'by = "margin"', 'summary.cca' etc, 'decostand', 'metaMDS', 'ordirgl', 'orditkplot', 'spantree' and 'mite' data,

Finally, the help files do not produce warnings or errors in R parser v2 (which was the immediate reason of releasing the package just prior to the release of R 2.9.0).

The next release may be in mid-June, 2009. This will probably be a minor release (1.15-3). There are still several functions that only are available in the R-Forge version of vegan (now 1.16-18).