What next?

Applying functions to your own data

Up to this point we’ve been using synthetic forest plot data. Real life forest plot data will be harder to use: there will be formatting issues, spelling mistakes, and transcription errors to deal with. The key to getting good results using the silvR functions (or any other R library) will be to making sure that your data are in the correct format and have undergone appropriate cleaning.

When you feel ready, arrange your data into a format similar to the sample data in silvR and load it into R (using read.csv()). Try and run through the worked examples, but this time with your own data.

New functionality

New functions will be added to silvR over time. If there’s something you’d like to see added, please do let us know! Contact sam.bowers@ed.ac.uk.

Other libraries of interest

silvR is just a small part of a large ecosystem of R libraries. If you have a statistical problem, it’s very likely that there exists an R library to help with it. Libraries that have been particularly helpful to us inclde:

1. vegan
2. BIOMASS
3. taxize
4. ggplot2

How do I learn more?

Learning to program is mostly a matter of practice. There are lots of free resources available online to assist in learning R. Some we can recommend are:

1. https://www.datacamp.com/courses/free-introduction-to-r
2. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6gx4Cwl9DGCzVMGCPi1kwvABu7eWv08P
3. https://ourcodingclub.github.io/
4. https://r4ds.had.co.nz/

Happy coding!