Introduction to R with Ecology data
EcoCommons is building the platform of choice to analyse and model ecological and environmental problems while also increasing digital literacy of researchers and students. This workshop will focus on improving your computational skills by showing you how the statistical program R can be used for data analysis and visualisation in Ecology.
The course starts with some basic information about the R syntax, the RStudio interface, and moves through how to import CSV files. We will also show you the structure of data frames, how to deal with factors and how to add/remove rows and columns. By the end of the workshop participants will have an overview of how to run their R code in the EcoCommons cloud environment and how to use the R package {tidyverse} to manipulate and visualise their data. In particular, we will demonstrate how to use the functions ‘select’ and ‘filter’ to manipulate your data and how to use the ‘pipe operator’ for more complex data manipulation in combination with ‘summarise’, ‘group_by’ and ‘count’ for quick summary statistics. At the end, we will show you how to visualise your data using different plots in the R package {ggplot2}.
This workshop is suitable for early career researchers, undergraduates and ecologists who have a keen interest to learn how to code in R while harnessing the power of cloud computing to solve environmental challenges. This course is very suitable for researchers, students and practitioners who have no or little R experience and coding skills and have the desire to learn how to use code within the cloud-computing resources of EcoCommons. It is also well suited for people who would like to refresh their coding skills in R.
This workshop is based on the Carperntries course: https://datacarpentry.org/R-ecology-lesson/
This workshop is brought to you by EcoCommons Australia. EcoCommons is a partnership of nine organisations including the NCRIS-funded Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), CEBRA at the University of Melbourne, CSIRO’s Land and Water unit, Griffith University, Macquarie University, QCIF, TERN, and the University of NSW. It also involves investment from the Queensland Government’s Research Infrastructure Co-investment Fund (RICF).
No prior knowledge needed
It is essential that you install and test R and RStudio well before the workshop.
Please carefully follow the instructions on https://datacarpentry.org/R-ecology-lesson/index.html to download, install and configure R and RStudio on your computer. If you already have R installed, please make sure it is version 4.0.0 or higher, or update it otherwise.