Forestmensuration.jl: Uma Introdução à Aplicações em Julia

Abstract

Computational advances essentially driven by operating systems and programming languages leverage several areas of knowledge, which use logical processes to transform data into information. Among these areas, forest measurement stands out, which brings together methodological concepts supported by mathematical principles to assess the dynamics of forests. Among the programming languages, the Julia language has recently been gaining prominence in the academic environment, due to its high performance and ease of learning. Being a modern alternative for complex models that demand speed of processing and mathematical efficiency. However, it still lacks models and functions aimed at the forestry sector, as well as tutorials in Portuguese. For these reasons, the objectives of this work are the development of a package for forest measurement, which gathers equations in an organized and standardized way and the creation of a tutorial material to teach the basic commands of the language and the package's functionalities. To this end, a review and selection of the main measurement topics covered in academic books was carried out and their translation into the Julia programming language. The tools used to develop the package were Git, GitHub, Visual Studio Code and Julia. To create the tutorial material, the Pluto and PlutoUI packages were used, generating interactive files in PDF format. The package developed has themes such as: descriptive and inferential statistics; usual dendrometric averages; frequency tables; diametric tables; volume tables; cube equations; simple, multiple and qualitative linear regression models; graphical analysis of regression residuals; selection criteria for the best regression model; and simple random sampling. The tutorial material consists of four modules: 1- Introduction to Julia; 2- Algorithms; 3- Graphical and Statistical Analysis; and 4- Package Tutorial: ForestMensuration.jl. It can be concluded that the package presents a solid base of equations and models that can be used by academics and professionals who want to perform data processing in an optimized way. In addition, along with the tutorial material, they promote the use of Julia language as an alternative to manipulate, transform and analyze forest data.