Implements the Variable importance Explainable Elastic Shape Analysis pipeline for explainable machine learning with functional data inputs. Converts training and testing data functional inputs to elastic shape analysis principal components that account for vertical and/or horizontal variability. Computes feature importance to identify important principal components and visualizes variability captured by functional principal components. See Goode et al. (2025) <doi:10.48550/arXiv.2501.07602> for technical details about the methodology.

The 'Vega-Lite' 'JavaScript' framework provides a higher-level grammar
    for visual analysis, akin to 'ggplot' or 'Tableau', that generates complete 'Vega'
    specifications. Functions exist which enable building a valid 'spec' from scratch
    or importing a previously created 'spec' file. Functions also exist to export 'spec'
    files and to generate code which will enable plots to be embedded in properly
    configured web pages. The default behavior is to generate an 'htmlwidget'.

Ordination methods, diversity analysis and other
  functions for community and vegetation ecologists.

Static and dynamic 3D plots to be used with ordination
    results and in diversity analysis, especially with the vegan package.

'Vega' and 'Vega-Lite' parse text in 'JSON' notation to render 
  chart-specifications into 'HTML'. This package is used to facilitate the 
  rendering. It also provides a means to interact with signals, events,
  and datasets in a 'Vega' chart using 'JavaScript' or 'Shiny'.

A set of functions to: (1) perform fuzzy clustering of vegetation data (De Caceres et al, 2010) <doi:10.1111/j.1654-1103.2010.01211.x>; (2) to assess ecological community similarity on the basis of structure and composition (De Caceres et al, 2013) <doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12116>.

Handling of vegetation data from different sources (
	Turboveg 2.0 <https://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/turboveg/>; 
	the German national repository <https://www.vegetweb.de> and others. 
    Taxonomic harmonization (given appropriate taxonomic lists,
    e.g. the German taxonomic standard list "GermanSL", <https://germansl.infinitenature.org>).