R exercises for Amy Angert's Plant Ecology course at UBC (BIOL 406).
In these exercises, students learn very basic data handling and visualization in R/RStudio using the tidyverse package.
This series of exercises was designed to be implemented in a 2 hour lab with additional work to be completed after lab (sections 5 and 6). It was designed for students with little to no previous experience with R. Rather than focus on R fundamentals, I designed this lab to give them tools to load, summarize, and visualize data. Our main objective was to give them the skills they would need to use R to prepare a report on an independent project later in the term.
In these exercises, we recreate some of the figures from:
Cameron EK, Cahill JF Jr, Bayne EM (2014) Root Foraging Influences Plant Growth Responses to Earthworm Foraging. PLoS ONE 9(9): e108873. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0108873
This data is available at https://era.library.ualberta.ca/files/z029p5988#.WIKrJZJVeAA
Included are a very brief presentation about tidy data, a student template script, a key script to circulate to students after the lab, and an instructor script with my notes for running the lab. There is also an example of messy data (Excel file) and tidied data (.csv files).
Feel free to use/adapt, and let me know if you have suggestions or questions.