MATCHACURVE for R

An Integrated Forest Management Lab Collective Project

 

Introduction

Chester Jensen, a USFS Research Scientist at the Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station put together a series of papers called “Matchacurve” that showed how different equations and their associated parameters influenced the shape and range of curves. They provided a series of hard copy graphs that could be used to aid researchers match curve forms with their data. We update this work here, providing an R-shiny web interface to allow modern-day research an interactive tool to examine equation forms and data, a skill that we think has been largely lost due to smoothing algorithms, spreadsheets, and imputation.

Chester’s original papers were:

Jensen and Homeyer 1970 Sigmoid and Bell-Shaped Curves

Jensen and Homeyer 1971 Curves of class X^N

Jensen 1973 Multidimensional Mathematical Models

Jensen 1976 Asymmetric Curves

Jensen 1979 e^-K Curves