Palaeoecological data analysis with R

MASSAFERRO, J.; PÉREZ, L.; DE PORRAS M.E; PÉREZ-BECOÑA, L.; TONELLO, M.S.; JUGGINS, S.

Pages Magazine

PAGES

Lugar: Berna; Año: 2014 vol. 22 p. 105 - 105

1811-1602

For the first time in Latin America, an intensive one-week course took place on paleoecological data analysis using the free software, R. This course was led by Steve Juggins (Newcastle University, UK), author of the R package ?Rioja? for the analysis of Quaternary science data and co-editor of the book Data Handling and Numerical Techniques. Twenty early-career paleoecologists from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, were selected from over 50applicants to attend this unique workshop. The course combined theoretical lectures with practicals using datasets from case studies on topics such as exploratory data analysis, data transformation, multiple regression, distancemeasures and cluster analysis, environmental reconstruction, and age-depth modeling. After the practicals the participants had the opportunity to process their own data. The participants also had the chance to meet other Latin American researchers working with different indicators, and some are now planning to establish an international network to address paleoenvironmental and climatic issues using a multi-proxy approach.