This course is recommended for participants with a basic or intermediate knowledge of R statistical software.

The first day will focus on taking advantage of the package’s capabilities in order to efficiently plot environmental data (e.g. time series, etc.) in eye-catching ways taking advantage of barplots, histograms, scatter plots, and density plots (among other data visualisations.) Environment (and geographical) data primarily describe objects with respect to their relationship in space (and/or time). As a result, it is of high importance to visualise the data in the form of a map. Thus, the R package ggmap will be introduced in order to show different ways that one can download maps from Googlemaps (or OpenStreetMap) which can then be used as a background layer in a ggplot 2 plot.

The second day will focus on introducing non-linear statistical regression techniques which can be taken advantage of when dealing with environmental (and/or geographical) data. Specifically, this session will include flexible regression modelling, introducing some of the theory and application of leading-edge regression models including non-linear, non-parametric, generalised additive and quantile regression models in environmental contexts. The teaching of all statistical topics will include both the relevant theory and practical aspects of how to apply and implement these methods to real environmental data in R. Participants will develop appropriate methods for the construction, selection and evaluation of advanced regression models, and will meet these models in a variety of practical environmental contexts.

Please note that even though there will be a brief introduction to the R programming language, participants will be required to complete some preliminary exercises to familiarise/refamiliarise themselves with the software. These exercises will be provided on Monday 11 November and will take approximately 4-5 hours to complete.

If you would like to book a place on this course of have any other questions please email Neil Jackson. Please note, this course has limited capacity and spaces will be given out on a ‘first-come, first served’ basis.

Venue: School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, Main Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ.

SAGES provided financial support for this course through the SAGES Training Support Scheme.