R Data Analysis

In the right hands, every bit of information is an important data point that can be summarized, analyzed, and presented to an audience in some way. All fields within the biological sciences deal with the implications of that statement, from genetic and spatial data, to species communities, populations, movements, development, and more. The data you collect during your experiments needs to be analyzed, interpreted, and presented in scientific papers, reports, broader articles or conferences.

In this introductory 4-day course we will cover different formats in which data can be organized and encountered, how we can summarize and handle that information to address the questions we need to answer, simple statistical analysis (such as linear regression and ANOVA), and how to plot these summaries and results in engaging ways.

For this purpose, we will use R, a free and common statistical software and programming language widely use as a tool in biology and other sciences. You will learn what R and Rstudio are, how to set up your computer to begin your work, how to read the data you need, and how to perform the tasks mentioned above.