Preface

Welcome to ESPM-157: Data Science in Global Change Ecology. This in-development course presents an opinionated approach to learning the tools of data science through the lens of global change problems. Many of these opinions are anchored in deeply researched pedagogy and experience, some are not.

After seven years of teaching in R, this version of the course is taught in Python. The R community has benefitted tremendously in recent years from an close-knit, inclusive and welcoming community of instructors and software developers, including a notable committment to learning and pegagogy from the company formerly known as RStudio its team of open source developers of the “tidyverse” under Hadley Wickham. Jenny Bryan (Statistics professor from UBC and a developer at RStudio) became an internet sensation for her ground-breaking open course, STAT-545, which heavily influenced the early development of ESPM-157 and many similar courses in R, which among other things helped pioneer teaching GitHub ‘from day 1’ and led to the creation of https://happygitwithr.com.

• It’s Abstractions All the Way Down, JD Long, Posit-Conf 2023.

Additional reading

• Data Science Lifecycle in DS100 book, Learning Data Science By Sam Lau, Joey Gonzalez, and Deb Nolan.

• Intro in R for Data Science

R4DS view:

The DS100 view of data cycle