Workshop

Work with Ecological Time Series Data in R | ESA 2016

Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting

This 3.5-hr workshop, taught at the 2016 meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, will cover how to open, work with and plot tabular (.csv format) time-series data in R. Additional topics include working with time and date classes (e.g., POSIXct, POSIXlt, and Date), subsetting time series data by date and time, and created facetted or tiles sets of plots. All materials taught in this workshop were developed in collaborative effort between Data Carpentry and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).

Required Prior Knowledge

The workshop will assume that participants have a basic level of familiarity with working with data in R, including installing and loading packages and data import.

This workshop will be taught at the 2016 meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. You must be a registered attendee of the conference and register for this workshop to participate in this workshop. For more information, visit the ESA 2016 annual meeting website.

## Things You’ll Need For The Workshop To participant in this workshop, you will need a **laptop** with the most current version of R and, preferably, RStudio loaded on your computer.

For details on setting up RStudio in Mac, PC, or Linux operating systems, please see the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Install R Packages

Please have these packages installed and updated prior to the start of the workshop.

  • ggplot2: install.packages("ggplot2")
  • lubridate: install.packages("lubridate")
  • scales: install.packages("scales")
  • gridExtra: install.packages("gridExtra")
  • reshape2: install.packages("reshape2")
  • zoo: install.packages("zoo")

Updating R Packages

In RStudio, you can go to Tools --> Check for package updates to update previously installed packages on your computer. Or you can use update.packages() to update all packages that are installed in R automatically.

More on Packages in R

Download Data

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Once you have downloaded the data, please set up a "data" directory as a parent directory to these three uncompressed directories. Set your R working directory to this "data" directory prior to the beginning of the workshop. If you would like further instruction please see the bottom of this page.

Workshop Instructors

  • Megan A. Jones; @meganahjones, Staff Scientist/Science Educator; NEON program, Battelle
  • Samantha Weintraub; @sr_weino, Staff Scientist, Terrestrial Biogeochemist; NEON program, Battelle

Please get in touch with the instructors prior to the workshop with any questions.

Social Media

Please tweet @NEON_sci and using the hashtag #WorkWithData during this workshop!

Workshop Location

Location: Ft Lauderdale Convention Center, Rm 316 Please double check the conference schedule as rooms may change!

All online materials can be accessed and used after the workshop and are linked on the next page: Workshop Materials in menu bar.

Additional Set Up Instructions

Prior to the workshop you should have R and, preferably, RStudio installed on your computer.

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Time Topic
7:45 Please come early if you have any setup or installation issues
8:00 Intro to Time Series Data in R
9:00 Dealing With Dates & Times in R
9:30 --------- BREAK ---------
9:45 NoData Values & Subsetting by Date
10:10 Time Series Plots with ggplot2
10:40 Multi-panel Plots with ggplot Facets
11:15 Additional Questions & Evaluation
11:30 End

Introduction to Working With Time Series Data in Text Formats in R