Tag: Ecology Across Borders

General, Meetings

Ending the Terror of R Errors

Post provided by Paul Mensink

Last year, I introduced R to petrified first-year biology students in a set of tutorials. I quickly realised that students were getting bogged down in error messages (even on very simple tasks), so most of my time was spent jumping between students like a wayward Markov chain. I would often find a desperate face at the end of a raised hand looking hopelessly towards their R console muttering some version of “What the $%# does this mean?”. I instantly morphed from teacher to translator and our class progress was slower than a for-loop caught in the second Circle.

Error messages are often not very helpful
Error messages are often not very helpful

Fast forward to Ecology Across Borders last December in Ghent, where rOpenSci and special interest groups from the BES, GfÖ and NecoV  and Methods in Ecology and Evolution  co-hosted a pre-conference R hackathon. I was elated to see that one of the challenges was focused on translating R error messages into “Plain English” (thanks to @DanMcGlinn for the original suggestion!). Continue reading “Ending the Terror of R Errors”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson2 Comments
Meetings

Ecology Hackathon at Ecology Across Borders 2017

Post provided by Gergana Daskalova

Brainstorming ideas at the Ecology Hackathon in Ghent.
Brainstorming ideas at the Hackathon.

Imagine an ecologist. Now imagine a programmer. Did you imagine the same person? If you were at the Ecology Hackathon on the day before the Ecology Across Borders (#EAB2017) conference in Ghent, Belgium (a joint conference between the BES, GFÖ, NecoV and EEF), you probably did (or at least we hope you did!).

Ecology is becoming increasingly quantitative and, as a result, we can add one more item on our daily to do lists as scientists:

  • Think of questions
  • Go on fieldwork / run simulations
  • Supervise students
  • Meet with our own supervisors
  • Teach
  • Write articles and review manuscripts
  • Answer emails
  • And now code as well

A Coding Community

Coding doesn’t need to be a lonely activity – one of the areas where it truly shines is collaborative coding. This can take us across borders and bring us together to figure out the best way to answer our research questions. That is exactly what the EAB Ecology Hackathon set out to do. Continue reading “Ecology Hackathon at Ecology Across Borders 2017”

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The BES Quantitative Ecology SIG: Who We Are, What We Do and What to Look Out for at #EAB2017

Post provided by Susan Jarvis and Laura Graham

Ecologists are increasingly in need of quantitative skills and the British Ecological Society Quantitative Ecology Special Interest Group (QE SIG) aims to support skills development, sharing of good practice and highlighting novel methods development within quantitative ecology. We run events throughout the year, as well as contributing to the Annual Meeting and providing a mailing list to share events, jobs and quantitative news.

Ecology Hackathon

The run up to the Ecology Across Borders joint Annual Meeting in Ghent this month is an exciting time for the SIG as we look forward to catching up with existing members as well as hopefully meeting some new recruits! Several of our SIG committee members will be in attendance and if you’ve been lucky enough to get a place at the Hackathon on the Monday you’ll meet most of us there. The Hackathon has been jointly developed by us and two of our allied groups; the GfÖ Computational Ecology Working Group and the NecoV Ecological Informatics SIG and is being sponsored by Methods in Ecology and Evolution. We’ll be challenging participants to work together to produce R packages suggested by the ecological community. You can see the list of package suggestions here. If you weren’t able to book a place at the Hackathon, but are interested in writing your own packages, you may be interested in the new Guide to Reproducible Code from the BES. Continue reading “The BES Quantitative Ecology SIG: Who We Are, What We Do and What to Look Out for at #EAB2017”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment
General, Meetings

Solving YOUR Ecology Challenges with R: Ecology Hackathon in Ghent

Scientific software is an increasingly important part of scientific research, and ecologists have been at the forefront of developing open source tools for ecological research. Much of this software is distributed via R packages – there are over 200 R packages for ecology and evolution on CRAN alone. Methods regularly publishes Application articles introducing R packages (and other software) that enable ecological research, and we’re … Continue reading Solving YOUR Ecology Challenges with R: Ecology Hackathon in Ghent

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment