An Introduction to R for Ecologists

Workshop to be held at ESA 2015 in Baltimore

Welcome to the GitHub repository for the Introduction to R for Ecologists workshop to be held at ESA 2015 in Baltimore

Location and time: Saturday, August 8, 2015
8:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Location: 303, Baltimore Convention Center

Organizers

Naupaka Zimmerman, Andrew MacDonald, Gavin Simpson, and Noam Ross.

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Many ecologists have started using the R statistical programming language to facilitate data analysis and visualization for their research. It is popular both because of its power and flexibility, but also because it makes it easier to produce analyses that are well-documented and reproducible. Plus, and perhaps best of all, it’s completely free! This workshop is meant for total beginners (of all career stages), who may have heard of R but never used it themselves, or for those who have just started using R but want a more formal introduction to the programming environment and to some general best practices. We will cover loading data, calculating basic statistics, and making plots. We will also highlight best practices for scientific computing along the way, including how to set up a directory structure that makes sense for code-driven analyses and writing well-commented, well-structured code. We will introduce the RStudio software environment and point out the benefits of using it to facilitate script writing. All participants must bring their own laptop with R and RStudio (available free online for all platforms at rstudio.com) pre-installed.

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Pre workshop instructions

Installing R

If you don't already have R set up with a suitable code editor, we recommend downloading and installing R and RStudio Desktop for your platform. Once installed, open RStudio check to make sure you are running the newest version of R (3.2.1) and that you don't get any error messages.

Downloading code/data from this repository

If you're already familiar with Git, then simply clone this repo. If you're not familiar with Git, simply hit the Download ZIP button on the right side of this page. If you're not sure where to save it, just download and unzip to your Desktop.

• Please wait until Friday afternoon to this so you are able to download the latest changes. Otherwise do another git pull or replace your downloaded copy with a newer one.*

If you're having any trouble with these steps please drop us an email. We'll also strive to have local copies if you forget to install any of these tools.

See you Saturday!

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These materials are all based on those created by the Data Carpentry organization and are Copyright (c) Data Carpentry. They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. See the LICENSE.md file for further details. You can access the original repository here.