Few books on statistical data analysis in the natural sciences arewritten at a level that a non-statistician will easily understand.This is a book written in colloquial language, avoidingmathematical formulae as much as possible, trying to explainstatistical methods using examples and graphics instead. Touse the book efficiently, readers should have some computerexperience. The book starts with the simplest of statisticalconcepts and carries readers forward to a deeper and more extensiveunderstanding of the use of statistics in environmental sciences.The book concerns the application of statistical and other computermethods to the management, analysis and display of spatial data.These data are characterised by including locations (geographiccoordinates), which leads to the necessity of using maps to displaythe data and the results of the statistical methods. Although thebook uses examples from applied geochemistry, and a largegeochemical survey in particular, the principles and ideas equallywell apply to other natural sciences, e.g., environmental sciences,pedology, hydrology, geography, forestry, ecology, and healthsciences/epidemiology.

The book is unique because it supplies direct access to softwaresolutions (based on R, the Open Source version of the S-languagefor statistics) for applied environmental statistics. For allgraphics and tables presented in the book, the R-scripts areprovided in the form of executable R-scripts. In addition, agraphical user interface for R, called DAS+R, was developed forconvenient, fast and interactive data analysis.

Statistical Data Analysis Explained: Applied EnvironmentalStatistics with R provides, on an accompanying website, thesoftware to undertake all the procedures discussed, and the dataemployed for their description in the book.