Fri, Aug 06, 2021: 7:00 AM-10:00 AM
Session Organizer:
Eric R. Sokol
Short courses are available to attendees who signed up in advance and paid an additional a short course fee. If you signed up for this short course, you should have received a direct link to it by email on Thursday.The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provides open ecological data from 81 locations across the United States. NEON data cover a wide range of subject areas within ecology, including organismal observations, biogeochemistry, remote sensing, and micrometeorology. This short course will focus on NEON biodiversity data. Instruction will include an overview of the breadth of NEON organismal data before providing code-along instruction on how to convert NEON organismal data into standardized formats for use with a variety of R packages commonly used to calculate standard biodiversity metrics. Examples will include Jost (2007)-style alpha, beta, and gamma diversity using the vegetarian and/or iNEXT packages; alpha, beta, and gamma variability using the ltmc package; and ordinations using the vegan package. Additionally, participants will learn about interoperability with the ecocomDP data format developed by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and data discovery and visualization tools available in the ecocomDP package (https://github.com/EDIorg/ecocomDP). At the end of the short course, time will be reserved for participants to work with the NEON data of their choice with instructors present to address any questions that arise while working with the individual data sets. Basic familiarity with R is required for participation in the short course. This short course does not provide a general overview of NEON data, nor the details of different ways of accessing NEON data. If you are interested in these topics, we recommend attending the "NEON Data Skills: Access and Work with NEON data" short course instead of, or in addition to, this one.The $25 fee for this short course includes access to the live session and any uploaded supporting documents during and after the conference.