When I first discovered colour scales, and started to move away from the simple R base graphics col = "red" style of notation, it took me a while to figure out how to actually use a colour scale in R - how to break it up into distinct colours and tell a plotting function which colour to use for what. When I get stuck on something, I often make a note of it, thinking that once I figure it out, it might be worth a blog post… so here we are.

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When I have anything R-related (ex. data, an analysis, some results, etc) that I want/need to discuss with somebody (ex. my supervisor, somebody willing to help me with my stats, etc), I often use the “Compile Report” command in RStudio in order to turn an R script into a an html document that has the code and output all together. This is really handy, because not only do you have your plots right there to show results, but if you want to discuss details about how you calculated those results, you also have the code right there as well.

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Hi! I’m Alie! I’m a PhD student in Evolutionary Biology with an MSc in Biological Anthropology. I study wild primates, with a focus on movement ecology. I love R, I have a complicated relationship with Excel, I dabble in MatLab, and I’d like to learn Python. Most of my current data wrangling and analyses are focussed on wild orangutan movement and home ranging behaviour. Maps are my jam. I’m originally from Canada, but I currently live in Switzerland with my partner and our cats.

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