Introductory distance sampling workshop and experience with R

[Eric Rexstad]

Krista

Thanks for your interest in the distance sampling workshop; I presume you are interested in the next offering, taking place 05-16 May.

I'll be teaching that workshop and understand your hesitance about the workshop and the expectation about experience with R.  I hope to put you at ease when I say the emphasis of the workshop is learning about distance sampling. We use R to help learn about distance sampling; but R takes a back seat to distance sampling.

In the exercises, I provide you with all the code you need to complete the exercises; again the emphasis is upon understanding the results produced by the code you generate, rather than building the code itself. The workshop uses a cloud-based version of RStudio, avoiding the need to install R and RStudio and we begin quickly to analyse distance sampling data. Of course, after the workshop you will want to install R and RStudio on your own computer, but that is not a prerequisite for the workshop.

To answer you question specifically—where can you gain some experience with R ahead of the workshop, here are a couple of suggestions. A group of R users in Sydney have developed some materials, you might spend some time with their resources

https://rladiessydney.org/courses/ryouwithme/

particularly Lesson 3 (Lessons 1 and 2 are about installation, which as I noted above you can skip).

Have a look at that resource and if you have more questions, send me a note.

Eric Rexstad

Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling

University of St Andrews

Registered Charity in Scotland SC013532

[John Willoughby]

There's a free 6-hr pre-recorded class by Mark Andrews in how to use R and RStudio that might be of interest:  

https://www.prstats.org/course/introduction-to-statistics-using-r-and-rstudio-irrs03r/

John Willoughby