Publications by R on R (for ecology)
Top five(ish) sources of ecological data
As you’re learning R, it can be hard to come up with data sets that you can practice with. Though many of us have our own data, those might not always be in the best format to do what we want. Our own data are often messy and require a lot of recoding and reformatting. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could download clean data sets that we could work ...
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How to make a scatterplot in R
Now that you’ve learned the very basics of plotting from our earlier tutorial on making your very first plot in R, this blog post will teach you how to customize your scatterplots to make them look better. If you want to take this even a step further, check out my step-by-step tutorial introduction to publication-quality scatterplots. You can ...
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How to make a boxplot in R
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to plot and customize boxplots (also known as box and whisker plots). Boxplots are a common type of graph that allow you to look at the relationships between a continuous variable and various categorical groups. They are super common in ecology because we often need to compare values between different...
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A *simple* introduction to ggplot2 (for plotting your data!)
If you’ve ever been totally confused by ggplot2 and what it is or how it works, my intention is that this short tutorial simplifies it down to a conceptual level from which you can build up later. Hope you enjoy! Data visualization is a powerful tool for scientists and their audiences to easily grasp relationships and trends in data. Some of y...
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How to create your own functions in R
We’ve talked a lot about how to use different pre-made functions in R, but sometimes you just need to make your own function to tackle your data. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how to create your own function and give a few examples. Components of a function Remember that a function is essentially a “black box” into which you...
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How to reshape your data in R for analysis
One of the toughest parts of data analysis is preparing your data to be analyzed. We often have to deal with problems like NAs, typos, and data that are formatted incorrectly. In this blog post, I’m specifically going to help you with that last one — I’m going to show you how to reshape data so that it’s in the correct form for data analy...
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The basics of prototyping and exporting your plots in R
It’s super rewarding when you finally figure out how to plot and visualize your data. But to show off your plot to the rest of the world, you need to first be able to save and export it from your R Studio workspace. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to prototype, save, and export your plots from R. (Note, I use the term ‘plot’ a...
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Free workshop on how to learn R
Hello everyone! I am psyched to announce the launch of my free workshop about how to learn R. It’s been a long time in the making, but it is finally here. The workshop is called The Myth of the R Learning Curve (or how not to go crazy when learning R). In the workshop, I go over my own personal story and how I came to love and learn R. I also t...
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R Data types 101, or What kind of data do I have?
Most of us are pretty familiar with data types in our daily lives — we can easily tell that things like 1, 2, 3, and 4 are numbers (in this case, integers). 15.7 is still a number, but has a decimal. We know that every single word I’m typing in this sentence is composed of characters, and we know that in math, “true” and “false” are t...
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How to organize your analyses with R Studio Projects
Here is a post that I am sharing from my old blog to get this one started. Enjoy! In this post I’ll go over a basic method method for organizing your ecological data analysis projects in R. Why do this? Reproducing analyses is critical for good science. There is nothing worse than trying to re-run a script when you finally get comments back fro...
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