When working with results from various bat surveys and inventories, Excel is probably the most used tool. Excel is great in many ways, but if someone wants to set up more automated workflows, then R is probably a better choice.
Therefore, we have decided to learn R together this year. Members of BatLife Sweden are invited to five zoom meetings during October 2023 where we discuss together in our own language.
Since the skills of the participants vary greatly, from complete beginners to experienced software developers, the training is based on a Coursera course where each person can study in their own phase. Then we use our weekly meetings to discuss the corresponding week's content in the Coursera course, as well as using code examples related to bats.
This GitHub repository will contain some example code and data related to bats.
Maybe this concept can be used by others. Here is a list of the external resources we use that might be useful if you want to learn R together with your friends in your local bat enthusiast group.
We focus primarily on R, RStudio and tidyverse, but will expand that depending on the needs expressed by the participants.
Nice short intro on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ0bV2Afkjc
We are using the "Data Analysis with R Programming" course since it covers R, RStudio and tidyverse in a nice way:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-analysis-r
This is the new edition of the tidyverse book, available both as a real book as well as a free web based book:
Then we use google docs to share some documents. They are all in Swedish since it is good to discuss thing in our own language when learning new stuff.
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Wishlist: What do you want to use R for?
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Q&A: One Q&A document for each week in the Coursera course.
This repository, and hopefully a few more repositories will be the result of our joint efforts as we learn more.