3 Managing biological data

Getting started

  • Review best practices for guidance on how to organize your files.

  • Download, to an appropriate folder, the following .csv files from Brightspace: You can also access these data from here. (As an alternative to the instructions below, you can load the data from the url using csv.read(), but you do need to use the link that appears after you click on the raw button in the upper righthand corner for the relevant .csv files. If you use this url method you do not need to download the data, but the url approach requires an internet connection to be able to load the data to R).

    • MoosePopulation.csv

    • SaplingStudy.csv

  • Open and save a new R Script. Complete the information at the start of the R Script template.

  • Set your working directory

  • Install and load the dplyr R package.

If you’re unsure how to install a package, see R Packages.

Throughout these instructions are links to the relevant sections in Quantitative Skills for Biology.

If you do not complete these steps, you will not be able to complete the HAND IN questions.

TO HAND-IN You are to hand in a .R file, formatted as shown in Best Practices - Template with questions and answers included as comments (#) with the lines of code to produce the output asked for included with each answer. ————————————————————————

3.1 Assignment Overview

Newfoundland has one of the highest moose densities in North America, despite moose being invasive to the island. Since their introduction in the early 20th century, moose populations have grown rapidly and now play a significant role in shaping Newfoundland’s ecosystems and its people.

The goal of this R coding assignment is to introduce students on to how to manage biological datasets.

In this assignment, you will work with mostly fictional datasets to explore how changes in moose populations over have affected:

1. Local biodiversity through moose tree browsing preferences on different species of tree saplings

2. Human communities through human-moose vehicle collisions.

3.2 Datasets Overview

You will be working two different datasets.

1. MoosePopulation.csv

2. SaplingStudy.csv

You must download these datasets before beginning this assignment. You can download them from Brightspace: You can also access these data from here. Then, save all .csv files to an appropriate folder (E.g., BIOL1002_Coding).