Introduction to Data Science for Ecologists

Catalog description

This course will introduce a set of data-science and computing skills, equivalent to basic lab skills, necessary for conducting reproducible, collaborative, and efficient analyses, with an emphasis on ecological problems. The primary tools will be R and RStudio, other tools for data management and collaboration will be introduced as needed (e.g., git, GitHub, OpenRefine). Students will learn, basics of data management, manipulation, visualization, and analysis as well as the concepts of literate programming – writing code that a computer can execute and a human reader can understand – and reproducibility / repeatability in research. In this course, we will learn by doing, replicating a genuine research experience. After some training in the basics, students will be assigned published scientific articles and work in teams (that include the instructor) to repeat analyses from those articles. No previous experience in R or programming is required.