Learning coding in R

R has been developed as a tool for statistical analysis and might by now be the most popular tool in this area. However, R is also a language that we can use to program simulation models in order to investigate population dynamical models in ecology. As such, R can to some extend replace proprietary software packages like MatLab or Mathematica.

This website contains an introduction to some R commands that are essential for coding simulations in R (and, in fact, pretty much everything else you might want to do in R…). Click the tab button and select from the different sections in the drop-down menu. You can work on this material by copying the R-code and pasting it in the script window of your R-Studio application.

This website borrows heavily from chapter 8 of the book

S. Allesina and M. Wilmes (2019). Computing Skills for Biologists: A Toolbox (2019).

In fact, several parts are produced by simply copy and paste parts from that chapter without further reference.

Material on this website is also inspired by the introductions to R that you can find in these books:

  1. Karline Soetaert and Peter M. J. Herman (2009). A practical guide to ecological modelling: using R as a simulation platform.

  2. M. Henry H. Stevens (2010). A Primer of Ecology with R.

  3. Clement Calenge. The R Software for Data Analysis and Modeling. in Dennis L. Murray and Brett K. Sandercock (2020). Population Ecology in Practice. Wiley-Blackwell.

The first two books are available as e-books at the Uppsala University Library.

An excellent and freely available systematic introduction to programming in R can be found here. Also this on seems to be a nice and gentle introduction. Several topics in R come with a cheat sheet, summarizing the most important elements of that topic, here the one for base R.

If you are more of a YouTube-person ckeck out this series of video tutorials.

Enjoy!

Claus