Course content is designed to be flexible to accommodate student interest and abilities. The order and timing of course topics may change as the semester progresses.
| Date | Title | Description | Assignment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8/29 | Introduction & Overview | Course Motivation & Objectives. Workflow & repeatable research in an era of big data for spatial environmental analysis. Getting started with the R Project for Statistical Computing & RStudio. | |
| 9/5 | Labor day | (no class) | Read Introduction to R |
| 9/12 | Data Wrangling | Data structures (vectors, matrices, data frames). Base graphics. Reading and writing data (from disk and internet). | Practice homework submitted during class. |
| 9/19 | Data Wrangling 2 | Filtering, selecting, joining data sets. Data gymnastics with dplyr. | Homework #1 |
| 9/26 | Graphics | More base graphics (scatterplots, histograms). The grammar of graphics: ggplot2 and extensions (ggmap, rasterVis, etc.). | |
| 10/3 | Spatial Data | Spatial Libraries: raster, sp, rgeos, rgdal. Integrating ‘traditional GIS’ analyses with statistical modelling. Data intersection (e.g. connecting points with polygons and rasters), overlays, zonal statistics | Homework # 2 |
| 10/10 | Spatial Raster I | Working with gridded spatial data | Project Proposal Due |
| 10/17 | Spatial Raster II | Raster calculations, working with climate datasets. | Homework # 3 |
| 10/24 | Spatial Raster III | A ‘mini’ project - looking at sea level rise in Bangladesh | |
| 10/31 | Reproducible Research & Literate Programming | RMarkdown to create dynamic research outputs. Publishing to github/word/html/etc. | |
| 11/7 | Weather/Climate Data Processing | Processing daily weather data from NOAA | First draft of project for peer assessment |
| 11/14 | Satellite Data Processing | Working with MODIS Satellite data | Peer Evaluation Due |
| 11/21 | High Performance Computing & Software Integration | Parallel processing and high performance computing in R, Calling other programs from within R. | Homework # 4 |
| 11/28 | Version Control | Managing code with “version control”" using Github. | Second draft of project Due 12/1 at midnight |
| 12/5 | Final Project Presentations | 5 minute presentation of your final project | |
| 12/14 | Final Project Due in UBLearns at midnight | See Project description for more information |