Introduction to the practicals#
These pages provide four GIS practical workbooks:
GIS practicals 1 and 2 support the GIS component of the Introduction to Ecological and Evolutionary Data Science for the following masters programmes at Imperial College London: the Living Planet program at the Silwood Park campus and Taxonomy, Biodiversity and Evolution MSc and Biosystematics MRes at the Natural History Museum.
GIS Practical 1 introduces a core set of GIS concepts and functions in R and explores some more common use cases. GIS Practical 2 then uses R to do species distribution modelling, which is a common applied GIS technique in biodiversity research.
The Landscape Ecology practical supports the Landscape Ecology and Conservation module for the Living Planet with Ecological Applications and Living Planet with Ecology, Evolution and Conservation streams.
The Spatial Statistics practical presents the use of R for spatial statistics and is provided as additional supporting material for research projects that require these specialised techniques, or for anyone who enjoys finicky stats problems!
All of these practicals are self-paced: you can work through them at your own speed and call out when you need help.
Three before ‘me’#
There will be a team of demonstrators to help you when you get stuck but please do remember that helping yourself is actually a far better way to learn. We do not want you to struggle but before you reach out to a demonstrator:
Ask yourself what you are trying to do: often stepping back and trying to write out an explanation for your problem helps you solve it.
Ask the internet: Sites like stackoverflow.com are an invaluable resource and you can use tags on
stackoverflow(e.g.[R]or[sf]) to narrow down your search.Ask each other: it can be really helpful to get together in a short Team meeting and crowd source an answer.
If none of those work then ask us!
Getting started#
You will need to install the required packages and the data required in the practicals. There are quite a lot of required packages - they could take a little while to set up. See here for details of the packages and data you will need.
Once you have the packages installed, have created a local working directory for the data and are running in R then create a new script file to record and run your code.
Work through the handouts at your own pace.
GIS packages#
There are loads of R packages that can load, manipulate and plot GIS data and we will be
using several in these practical. In the last few years, the R spatial data community
has been working on updating most of the core GIS functionality into a few core
packages, notably sf and terra. We will focus on using these up-to-date central
packages, but there will be some occasions where we need to use older packages, such as
sp and raster.
Tasks#
Introducing tasks
A lot of these practicals will consist of following provided code to understand how it works but occasionally there will be tasks to test the skills you have been learning. These will start with a task bar like the one above and then have a description like this one. There will then always be a button marked ‘Click to show’: if you get really stuck, you can click on this to show a solution. Do try and figure it out for yourself and if you don’t understand something, ask a demonstrator to help.
Hey! No peeking