Introduction to the practicals

These pages provide the practical guides for the Ecological and Evolutionary Data Science module for the following masters programmes at Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum:

• the Living Planet program at the Silwood Park campus,

• the Taxonomy, Biodiversity and Evolution MSc at the NHM, and

• the Biosystematics MRes at the NHM.

All of these practicals are self-paced: you can work through them at your own speed and call out when you need help.

• Spatial methods in Ecological and Evolutionary Data Science

• Analysing microclimate sensor data

Getting started¶

• You will need to install the packages and the data required in the practicals. There are quite a lot of required packages - they could take a little while to set up. See practical requirements page for details of the R packages and data you will need.

• Once you have the packages installed, have created the working directories for the data and practicals and are running in R then create a new script file to record and run your code.

• Work through the handouts at your own pace.

Tasks¶

# And any R code needed to complete the task

Getting help¶

There will be a team of demonstrators to help you when you get stuck but please do remember that helping yourself is actually a far better way to learn. We do not want you to struggle but before you reach out to a demonstrator, please try and follow the three before me strategy

1. Ask yourself what you are trying to do: often stepping back and trying to write out an explanation for your problem helps you solve it.

2. Ask the internet: Sites like stackoverflow.com are an invaluable resource and you can use tags on stackoverflow (e.g. [R] or [sf]) to narrow down your search.

3. Ask each other: it can be really helpful to get together in a small group, either in person or online, and crowd source an answer.

If none of those work then ask us!