R for Biologists

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A crash course in R.

View the Project on GitHub hcliedtke/RforBiologists_UDSM

Course Description

This course is aimed at biologists who wish to learn how to use R for data analysis. Participants are expected to have little to no experience using R, but are familiar with different types of biological data and basic statistics. This course will introduce participants to the R programming language provide a crash-course on how to use this tool for data wrangling, visualization and basic statistical testing. Participants who have specific interests/needs (such as those working with phylogenetic, GIS, sound recordings or other types of biological data) are encouraged to bring datasets with them.

The practical sessions of this course will heavily rely on the tidyverse in R. This is a great tool for manipulating and visualizing data. We will touch on some of the elements here, but for a much more in detail tutorial, I suggest this R book by Brendan Ansell.

Prerequisite

Participants are required to bring their own laptop with at least 4Gb of RAM and a processor with at least 2 cores (e.g. minimum Intel Core i3 or similar) and a working internet connection.

Prior to the course, you should download and install both R and RStudio desktop on your system. Do so, by following these instructions.

On the final day, we will have time to work with your own data. please bring a dataset that you are currently working on. It can be any type of biological data that is organized in some sort of table.

Course Outline

The course will be held at the Science Complex Building, University of Dar es Salaam, Seminar Room SC 415. Precise location to be announced.

Day 1 (24th January 2024, 9am-12pm)

  1. Introduction to the R programming language
  2. The basics
  3. Scripting with R markdown

Day 2 (25th January 2024, 9am-12pm)

  1. Data-wrangling with the tidyverse
  2. Data visualization with ggplot2

Day 3 (26th January 2024, 9am-12pm)

  1. Basic statistics in R
  2. Bring your own data!

Contact and feedback

Course organizers

For questions about the course material contact: christoph.liedtke@ebd.csic.es. For questions about the course organization contact: johnlyakurwa@gmail.com