The following notes are from an introductory, 5-week course on the topic of conducting ecological analyses in the statistical program R taught by an IGERT student Matt Lau. The goal was to develop a basic skill set needed to begin using R and cover analyses typical to and advanced but potentially useful for ecological studies.

R-Course

Day 1

- A brief introduction to R, including details on the workspace, language and basic statistics

Day 2

- Managing R analyses efficiently

- Installing and loading packages

- Advanced plotting

- Visualizing community data (heatmaps and ordinations)

- Beggining community analyses

Day 3

- Community analyses continued (including AnoSim, MRPP, PerMANOVA and Indicator Species Analyses)

- Advanced R programming (looping)

- Problem Set

- Data Set

Day 4

- Advanced R programming continued (functions, sorting data)

- Advanced analysis topics (PCA, AIC)

Day 5

- Monte-Carlo methods

- Very brief introduction to Bayesian statistics in R and WinBUGS