Previous steps

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Context

The coding standards for the GCRMN are largely influenced by the work of Hadley Wickham and the development of the tidyverse.

This wiki page aims to provide some background to the coding standards for the GCRMN and how adhering to these standards will help in the transferability of code and knowlege across coral reef monitoring programmes and researchers.

Underlying philosophy of the tidyverse

It would be a disservice to Hadley and contributors to the tidyverse to attempt to encapsulate the tremendous work invested in developing these tools which have truly revolutionised the use of R for data manipulation and visualisation.

The best way to summarise their approach is in this figure, which illustrates the link between importing raw data, formatting & standardisation, visualisation, modelling and communication:

For enabling the conversion of data from “grass roots” coral reef monitoring programmes to influencing the highest levels of international governance, this simple diagram summarises what we are trying to achieve in this training course.

Building expertise in Data Science

All course participants are encouraged to visit the online book for data science in R:

To cover all of the elements in this excellent resource is beyond the scope of this present training course. However, we will base a lot of the training on principles in this book - albeit applied to coral reef monitoring and the nature of GCRMN contributor data.

Next steps

Having covered the set up of our computers, creating of a local copy of the project repository and some of the underlying philosophy of data handling and GCRMN standards, we will now launch into how to use pipes!