The idea of writing a blog never allured me. Keeping a blog requires writing posts with a certain frequency, having always something interesting to say, and share the posts around so that someone actually reads them and they do not just pile among the e-paper garbage of the web. Or maybe not. I decided that I should not force myself, and I will write whenever I want it about whatever I want, but ideally I would like to share something that may be useful for others. I know that I will eventually end up talking about chess, poetry, natural protected areas of the world, or just about a beautiful animal or two, but I am a young ecologist in the first place and if I could do something useful for others I should probably start from here.
Now I am going to talk about why to learn the R software because I remember that a decade ago when I was trying to self-taught me the program I thought it was a bloody impossible challenge. It wasn’t. Now I even help other people to learn R. I also gave an introductory course on R when I was in Argentina during my PhD in 2016, and a refresh course (which was very much an introductory course) during the Greek Summer School in conservation biology in 2019, and both were very well received. I am sorry if you are not matching the description, but this post is for young BSc, MSc, and at max fresh PhD students in ecology. If you are not one of those, you can still read.
I remember the time when I was a BSc student enrolled at the University of Palermo, in Sicily. I loved nature (still do) and I was hoping that being students of natural sciences we will spend large amounts of time studying in the field. You guessed it already, in this sense it was a disappointment. We had field excursions in the program, but nothing comparable to what I was dreaming of. Fortunately, I found a number of other students like me, who had my same urge of being outdoor. Every weekend, we started doing regular hiking in natural protected areas around Sicily. We learned to identify quite a number of insects, birds, plants and…I have to confess that we pretty much stopped doing some taxonomy. We were curious about the causes of the presence or absence of species, their abundances, the phenological patterns, but we had no idea about where to start and what to do with the data, eventually. In one word, we were unable to do ecological research independently, so we made do with taxonomy (and even there we had to ask experts to help us identify our and their favourite beasts from photos).
I can never stop thinking that R is a beautiful gift, even when my scripts are not working and I am getting crazy trying to figure out where the error is. R is a gift because it is free, relatively easy to use compared to other programs, it is constantly updated and improved, you can do many statistical analyses and also generate sophisticated graphs, there is a lot of help everywhere (Youtube, free pdf on the web, university websites, blogs), and it allows you get the independence that I was craving when I was a student and that is essential to do ecological research. To be fair, I and my friends were not even trained in basic sampling techniques, so lacking R wasn’t our only problem. However, if you know how low-tech can be the sampling devices used by entomologists you likely agree with me. You need about 5 minutes to understand how to dig a plastic cup into the ground to collect ground-active arthropods and how does it work, and about 5 months just to make basic operations with R.
Frankly, I don’t think I would have been able to do interesting ecological research when I was a BSc student in Sicily, even if I knew how to use the R software and with a good background in statistics. But the truth is that we will never know. The more I do ecological research the more I think that the difficult part is to generate interesting ideas, valid hypotheses, and design good experiments. For those things, you need to make experience, or at least you need the help of someone who has this experience.
However, I am sure that studying ecology would have been much more fun if I knew R already back then. I and my friends would have been out watching bugs exactly as we did, but we would have learned how to generate hypotheses, how to methodologically sample various organisms, the importance of keeping field notes, how to store data, and all the unpredictable things that happen when you are in the field and that you don’t know until you know. R would have opened for us a new world of research, we would have felt confident and free to test our ideas and learn from our mistakes. So, if you are a BSc, MSc, or a young PhD student and you want to know why I think you should learn R, my answer is that if you are curious about ecology, R teaches much more than you believe.
In my first post, I said that I will try to limit my words to 1 page, and my second article is almost 2 pages. I feel I am already losing control of the blog!
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