Introduction to R

SWFWMD R Training

About this Training

This training is designed for SWFWMD staff who already have some experience working in R and want to become more effective using it for real analysis tasks. Attendees are expected to be comfortable running code in RStudio, but may want more confidence writing their own scripts for data wrangling, adapting scripts from colleagues, troubleshooting errors, and building reproducible workflows.

The training content will combine instructor-led demonstrations with hands-on exercises focused on data manipulation, visualization, and practical problem solving. Examples will be framed around SWFWMD data and workflows so participants can connect the material to the kinds of data analysis problems they encounter in their work. By the end of the training, attendees should be better prepared to understand existing scripts, troubleshoot common issues, and use R more confidently for applied analyses.

Agenda

Time	Topic
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM	Introduction and Setup
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM	R Overview
10:30 AM - 10:45 AM	Break
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM	Data Wrangling Part 1
12:15 PM - 1:00 PM	Lunch
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM	Data Wrangling Part 2 and Data Visualization
2:30 PM - 2:45 PM	Break
2:45 PM - 4:15 PM	SWFWMD Examples
4:15 PM - 4:30 PM	Wrap-up

Housekeeping

There are a few housekeeping items we need to go over before we start the training.

1. Feel free to ask questions during the training. This is your time and I don’t want it spent without a dialogue.

2. Please use your own installation of RStudio during this training. The setup instructions are here.

3. We have a live coding link that we’ll be using as we go through the lessons, accessible here. If you get lost, you can copy/paste code from this link into RStudio.

4. All training content is on this website. We will be covering the content directly on the website, so if you get lost you can view the agenda to see which lesson we’re covering and find where we’re at by scrolling through the content.

5. Each lesson has its own R script that is linked at the top. If you are not using the live coding link, you can download the lesson R script and use that directly.

6. Finally, please make sure to download the required datasets here and make sure you have the here, tidyverse, sf, mapview, and ggspatial packages installed. See the setup instructions for details.

All exercises and breaks will be timed to make sure that we stay on schedule. A timer will be displayed on the screen to track progress.

Software requirements

This training will use RStudio and R. Please make sure that you are ready to use the required software prior to the training by following the setup instructions here. Installation issues will not be addressed the day of the training.

Data and resources

Please view the Data and Resources page for data used in this training and additional links for R learning material.

Instructor

Dr. Marcus Beck is the Senior Scientist for the Tampa Bay Estuary Program in St. Petersburg, Florida and is developing data analysis and visualization methods for Bay health indicators. Marcus has experience researching environmental indicators and developing open science products to support environmental decision-making. He has been using the R statistical programming language for over 15 years and has taught several workshops on its application to environmental sciences. Marcus has also developed several R packages and currently maintains 7 on CRAN. He received a PhD in Conservation Biology with a minor in Statistics from the University of Minnesota in 2013, his Masters in Conservation Biology from the University of Minnesota in 2009, and his Bachelors in Zoology from the University of Florida in 2007. GitHub, Scholar, CV

Source content

All source materials for this website can be accessed at https://github.com/tbep-tech/swfwmd-r-training

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