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...