Principles of resilient coding for plant ecophysiologists.

Plant ecophysiology is founded on a rich body of physical and chemical theory, but it is challenging to connect theory with data in unambiguous, analytically rigorous and reproducible ways. Custom scripts written in computer programming languages (coding) enable plant ecophysiologists to model plant processes and fit models to data reproducibly using advanced statistical techniques. Since many ecophysiologists lack formal programming education, we have yet to adopt a unified set of coding principles and standards that could make coding easier to learn, use and modify.