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Revision History for OFR 2005-1353

Marian K. Talbert and Brian S. Cade

User Manual for Blossom Statistical Package for R

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Posted online 2005

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Revised and reposted August 8, 2013

Abstract:
Blossom is a package for the R statistical environment for making statistical comparisons with distance-function based permutation tests developed by 
P.W. Mielke, Jr. and colleagues at Colorado State University (Mielke and Berry, 2001) and for testing parameters estimated in linear models with permutation 
procedures developed by B.S. Cade and colleagues at the Fort Collins Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey. This manual serves as a vignette for the R package
with examples and content similar to the Fortran version of Blossom documented in U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2005–1353 (Cade and Richards, 2005).
The statistical capabilities and options for the multi-response permutation procedure (MRPP) family of tests and for the linear model permutation procedures are identical between the Fortran version of Blossom and the R package Blossom.

History:  
Early Fortran versions of Blossom were developed in 1991 and 1994 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (W.B. Slauson, B.S. Cade, and J.D. Richards)
and were followed by improved versions developed by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1999, 2000, and 2005 (B.S. Cade and J.D. Richards). The mature Fortran
version of Blossom was published as the User Manual for Blossom Statistical Software (Cade and Richards, 2005), U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report
2005–1353, with the software available for downloading. This revised version of Blossom as an R contributed package represents our latest software development,
and all improvements or changes in capabilities are expected to be made in the R package.

Software source:  
The Blossom package for R will be distributed off The Comprehensive R Archive Network at http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/.