Today I’m going to talk about a useful family of functions that allows you to repetitively perform a specified function (e.g., sum(), mean()) across a vector, list, matrix, or data frame. For those of you familiar with ‘for’ loops, th...

I’ve talked a little bit about pipes (written as %__%) in a past blog post, but they’re so important in R that I thought they deserved their own post. In this tutorial, I’m going to give an explanation of what pipes are and when the...

In scientific data and experiments, we often have groups of subjects between which we want to compare an observed response. For example, we might want to compare the growth rates of plants under different light treatments. Or maybe we want to compare C...

Welcome to part two of my blog series on R Markdown. In the first part, I went over how to create a basic R Markdown document and how to use R Markdown syntax. In this post, I’m going to talk about how you can use R Markdown to learn ...

Today I’m excited to share a blog post on how to use R Markdown. R Markdown is a dynamic file format that allows you to make documents containing normal text alongside chunks of embedded R code. In fact, all of my blog posts are written using R M...

As many of us know, science is not a perfect process. Maybe you can’t get out in the field on a certain day. Maybe you can only sample a portion of what needs to get done. Or maybe you’re downloading public data sets and they aren’t l...

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about joining data tables together. Joining tables is incredibly useful when you have to download several data files on a common set of subjects and then aggregate them into a larger, singular data set. This i...

(¿Quieres más detalles sobre el curso en español? Desplázate hacia abajo.) Hello everyone! This blog post is a bit different from usual posts in that I’d like to make a very exciting announcement about an upcoming course launch. Part of my vision...

With the new year, I’m hoping more of you take up learning R, so with that I want to share a tutorial from my course on an introduction to data visualization with R to help get you started. If you are completely new to R and don’t even ...

One of the first steps to learning R is to have it downloaded and installed on your computer. In this post I’ll show you how to do that and how to download and install RStudio—a key tool for using R, and how I do all my work and ...

When learning R, it can be tough to figure out how to apply what you’ve learned to your own data. We often learn general skills that are helpful for manipulating our data, but things aren’t always so simple when it comes to your own analysi...

As scientists, we often have data or results in R that we want to export to Microsoft Word for the reports or publications that we’re writing. In this tutorial I show you how to do just that. You can also watch this tutorial as a video if you want ...

Hey everyone! I just finished putting together a video tutorial that goes over my Essential Functions of R (for ecology) Cheatsheet. I decided to create a separate post here because some of you were asking for an easy walk-through of the functions on the cheatsheet and I think that merits ...

Evolution by natural selection is a powerful process that leads to (and continues to shape) the wonderful diversity of organisms on Earth today. It is fairly simple in its mechanics—essentially an optimization routine that allows species to evolve to a...

I’ve been having fun with R through some side projects lately. One of which involves trying to use some machine learning and evolutionary algorithms to teach my computer to draw… (I hope to share a post on that project before too long). Bu...

Scatterplots are one of the most common types of data visualizations you will encounter as a biologist. They present the relationship between two continuous variables. We might take them for granted by their simplicity, but we shouldn’t assume the seeming intuition with which we can see and comprehend these ...

I think that the “difficult” R learning curve is a myth. That’s because what people call the “R learning curve” is actually the combination of several disparate skill sets that are often taught as one conglomerated curricu...

In this tutorial I show you how to do a simple linear regression in R that models the relationship between two numeric variables. Check out this tutorial on YouTube if you’d prefer to follow along while I do the coding: The first step is to loa...

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 s...