ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the motivation for writing the book and introduces the main differences to existing textbooks. The book describes modern statistical methods needed in the analysis of forestry and environmental data. These data often show nonconstant variances and have grouped structure or are otherwise dependent. The chapter points out a number of other issues, related to the use of statistical methods, which are often poorly understood by non-statisticians. For example, forestry and environmental data sets are often so big that the normality assumptions can be de-emphasized. The book contains approximately 170 examples using R software package. The examples, on one hand, help to understand the mathematical concepts and, on the other hand, show how the presented theory can be applied in practice Many of them are only referenced briefly in the book and are available in their entirely at the book website www.biombook.org. The website also includes full R-scripts for all examples of the book. The book contains many boxes which give additional viewpoints to the methods presented in the main part of the book.
