Summary and Setup

The goal of this lesson is to provide an introduction to R for learners working with geospatial data. It is intended as a pre-requisite for the R for Raster and Vector Data lesson for learners who have no prior experience using R. This lesson can be taught in approximately 4 hours and covers the following topics:

• Working with R in the RStudio GUI
• Project management and file organization
• Importing data into R
• Introduction to R’s core data types and data structures
• Manipulation of data frames (tabular data) in R
• Introduction to visualization
• Writing data to a file

The R for Raster and Vector Data lesson provides a more in-depth introduction to visualization (focusing on geospatial data), and working with data structures unique to geospatial data.

Getting Started

Data Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to use their own computers to insure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow.
This lesson assumes no prior knowledge of R.

To get started, follow the directions in the workshop Setup page download data to your computer and follow any installation instructions.

This lesson is designed to be taught in conjunction with other lessons in the Data Carpentry Geospatial workshop. For information about required software, and to access the datasets used in this lesson, see the setup instructions on the workshop homepage.