Background

NEON collects a plethora of interesting ecological data throughout North America, so we will just explore a tiny bit of bird data from the Harvard Forest site from 2015-2018.

Objectives

This ungraded in-class activity is meant to get you started with the NEON bird data assignment. Important tasks include:

  • Download and import yearly NEON data files.
  • Combine multiple data.frame ojects into a master data.frame.
  • Numerical and graphical exploration of the bird data.

Data

You’ll use data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).

You can find the data files on the main course GitHub page.

You need to download the NEON data files for each year

Helpful functions:

  • here()
  • rbind()
  • head()
  • hist()

Instructions:

  • Download all the yearly NEON data files (2015 - 2018)
  • Import the data into R. I suggest using descriptive variable names like birds_2015 etc.
  • Combine all the yearly data into a single large data.frame. Call this data.frame birds_all.
  • View the first 6 rows of the data. Do you remember which function does this?

Questions

You won’t turn in this assignment, but to complete the NEON group assignment, you’ll need to make sure you can answer questions like the following about the dataset:

  1. How many total observations are there for all the years?
  2. How many observations were there in 2016?
  3. Which columns contain numeric data?
  4. Perform a numerical exploration of the numeric columns.
  5. Create a histogram of the observerDistance column.
  6. Create a histogram of the pointCountMinute column. Do you notice any potential problems?