Summary and Setup

Lesson Author: Jarrett Byrnes

This is a new lesson built with The Carpentries Workbench. It is designed to teach the basics of how to build an R Shiny app. Much of the material these lessons draw on come from Dean Attali’s wonderful tutorials (see here for slides or see here for a walkthrough) as well as the excellent Mastering Shiny book by Hadley Wickham.

Prerequisites

Data Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to use their own computers to ensure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow. To most effectively use these materials, please make sure to download the data and install everything before working through this lesson.

R Skill Level

This lesson assumes you have some knowledge of R. If you’ve never used R before, or need a refresher, start with our Introduction to R for Geospatial Data lesson.

Geospatial Skill Level

This lesson assumes you have some knowledge of geospatial data types and common file formats. If you have never worked with geospatial data before, or need a refresher, start with our Introduction to Geospatial Concepts lesson.

Install Software and Download Data

For installation instructions and to download the data used in this lesson, see the Geospatial Workshop Overview.

Download Data

In the vein of the initial R lessons for this GIS workshop, setup a new project as we did in lesson 2 and create a data folder. For the data, we will use this unified seagrass data set which brings together multiple years from the Maine DEP and DMR seagrass surveys that we have joined after cleaning.

Setup RStudio Project

Make sure you have set up a RStudio project for this lesson, as described in the setup instructions and that your working directory is correctly set.

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