R Literacy for digital soil mapping

Part 1

  • R basics: commands, expressions, assignments, operators, objects
  • R Data Types
  • R data structures
  • Functions, arguments, and packages
  • Getting help.

Part 2

  • Vectors, matrices, and arrays
  • Vector arithmetic, some common functions and vectorised formats
  • Matrices and arrays.

Part 3

  • Data frames, data import, and data export
  • Creating data frames manually
  • Working with data frames

Part 4

  • Graphics: the basics

Part 5

  • Manipulating data. Modes, classes, attributes, length, and coercion
  • Indexing, sub-setting, sorting and locating data
  • Factors
  • Combining data

Part 6

  • Exploratory data analysis
  • Summary statistics
  • Histograms and boxplots
  • Normal quantile and cumulative probability plots

Part 7

  • The basics of linear models

Part 8

This section introduces how to construct a function. A function is at the heart of R and is akin to a set of instructions to run a particular task. Functions are incredibly powerful and the fact that one can create their own functions leaves open the door for some very creative thinking about how to solve a particular problem or to conduct bespoke tasks.

The example here is about how one would go about designing a soil sample down along a toposequence. The starting point could be the top of a hill, at the bottom of a hill or anywhere between. This seems pretty intuitive to do in your mind, but to code this in R or any language requires a bit of logical thought and creativity. These are important for learning R and for doing digital soil mapping things!