The book lays out the basic operations involved in the analysis, the underlying hypotheses, aims and points of views. It conveys the message that each step in the calculations has a specific, straightforward meaning and that patterns and processes known by ecologists often find their counterpart in mathematical operations and functions. The first chapters introduce the elementary concepts and operations and relate them to real-world phenomena and problems. Later chapters concentrate on combinations of methods to reveal surprising features in data sets. Showing how to find patterns in time series, how to generate simple dynamic models, how to reveal spatial patterns and related occurrence probability maps.