McDonald Data Sciences Blog

Blogging R and environmental statistics topics

Aleutian Tern Surveys Begin

2024 Aleutian tern surveys in southern Alaska begin today.

Projects

Aleutian terns

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and I are happy to announce initiation of the 2024 Aleutian tern surveys.

finFindR: Top 10 ‘Most Cited’ Marine Mammal Science Papers

Fin matching paper among top 10 most cited articles in Marine Mammal Science during 2022 and 2023

Marine Mammals

Image Recognition

Wiley reported today that our paper, finFindR: Automated recognition and identification of marine mammal dorsal fins using residual convolutional neural networks, is one of…

Zoom To Point

Center native R plots of spatial objects on a point, and use a specified zoom level

R

Spatial

Native R plots (using plot) are quick and easy ways to check spatial objects. Native R plots, however, are static and changing the plot extent (zooming or panning) is not…

Double Observer Surveys: Post 1

Full Independence and Equal Sightability

R

Distance Analysis

Double-observer line-transect surveys estimate the abundance of targets (e.g., targets could be birds, bears, bats, bees, etc.) in an area. Double-observer line-transect…

Extracting Tracks from KML

GPS tracks from KML via XML

R

Spatial

XML

R is amazing at geospatial analysis. Most geospatial objects import easily. Some objects from some formats do not. This post is about importing a GPS track from the Keyhole…

Permutation Tests

Nearly bomb-proof tests for arbitrary distributions and measurements

R

Computer Intensive

Permutation tests are powerful, almost bomb-proof, multi-sample statistical tests. Permutation tests are not widely taught, and most internet pages on the subject are…

Rdistance is back on CRAN

Distance analysis package Rdistance is back on CRAN after an extended hiatus

R

Distance Analysis

Rdistance, a package for line and point transect distance analysis, is back on CRAN after a 2-year hiatus. Rdistance has always been available on Github. Now, it passes all…

Traveling Salesman and BAS

An efficient route through spatially balenced points

R

Sampling

In this post, I discuss the practicalities of route finding for spatially balanced samples and demonstrate an efficient route through the set of spatial points.

Spatial Capture-Recapture Reasoning

Analagy for the way SECR works

Statistics

Spatial capture-recapture models are relatively new and difficult to understand. I have been asked several times, “How do SECR models work?”. In this post I give an analagy…

Mirrored Histograms

R

Mirrored histograms are excellent for comparison of proportions. Proportion comparison is at the heart of habitat analysis and I use them often.

Package Initiation

Steps to create an empty package

R

R Packages are awesome. Here, I show you how to initiate a clean new package. Why I initiate things this way is beyond the scope of this post. A more complete description of…

Beginner Line-transect Analysis

Estimation of a simple distance function

R

Distance Analysis

In this post, I demonstrate how to estimate a distance function using Rdistance.