The R statistical language has enjoyed wide and rapid adoption by many ecologists, and is used across many ecological subdisciplines for statistical analyses and the production of publication quality figures. For community ecologists using R, one of the most used, and most useful, add on packages is vegan, which provides a wide range of functionality covering inter alia ordination, diversity analysis, and ecological simulation. This workshop will offer participants a practical introduction to some of the most useful functions available within vegan. We will focus in particular on the use of NMDS as an ordination method and on how to visualize the results using related plotting tools. We will also cover between group tests such as PERMANOVA. The workshop will assume that participants have a basic level of familiarity with working with data in R, including data import and basic indexing and subsetting. Some familiarity with distance measures is recommended, but not required, as we will briefly cover data transformation, standardization, and multivariate distance measures. All participants must bring their own laptop with R and RStudio (available free online for all platforms at rstudio.com) preinstalled. All data files and code for this workshop will be made publicly available on github.com, so participants as well as those unable to attend will have access to them as a resource.