Workshops & Presentations

Workshops

These are general workshops which I have prepared and are ready to facilitate
For non-commercial organizations looking for a workshop to offer their members, I’m more than happy to volunteer my time to facilitate the 2-hour workshops, time permitting.

Dealing with Data in R (2 days)
Running statistics in R, while difficult, is made even more so by the challenge of using R to manipulate data. This workshop therefore focuses on teaching the use of RStudio and the tidyverse suite of packages (e.g., ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, etc.) to create figures and data visualizations, load, clean and summarize data, and generally troubleshoot R. This workshop is geared towards raw beginners, those with a basic familiarity with R, and towards intermediate R users unfamiliar with the tidyverse suite of packages or those wanting to up their game.
Materials

Introduction to Rmarkdown/Quarto for Reproducibility (~2 hours)
Do you struggle to keep track of your R analyses? Is future-self constantly complaining about past-self’s inability to document scripts, data and package versions? Come explore the magic of RMarkdown & Quarto! Turn your R scripts into reproducible reports complete with all the information future-self needs to write up your analyses.
Materials

Making figures in R! (~2 hours)
Join Steffi for this gentle introduction to R through the creation of figures. Good for those with no R experience and those who want to learn more about using the ggplot2 R package.
Materials

Presentations

2024-11-Participatory-Science (GitHub)

2022-04 - rOpenSci (GitHub)

2021-11 UofM - rOpenSci (GitHub)

  • 2021-11_UofM_rOpenSci (Rmd | html)

2021-10 Edmonton R user group - rOpenSci (GitHub)

  • Edmonton_R_user_rOpenSci (Rmd | html)

2021-08 AOS|SOC - R Symposium (GitHub)

  • AOS_SCO_2021_LaZerte (Rmd | html | video | pdf)
  • ElenaWest_LightningTalk_MixSIAR (pdf)
  • naturecounts_AOS_SCO Aug 2021 Final ENG-FR (pdf)
  • supplemental (Rmd | pdf)

2021-08 ESA rOpenSci (GitHub)

  • 2021-08_ESA_rOpenSci (Rmd | html | pdf)
  • 2021-08_ESA_rOpenSci_handout (Rmd | pdf)

2021-04 rOpenSci - Community (GitHub)

  • 2021-04_rOpenSci_community (Rmd | html)

2019-11 rOpenSci - Testing (GitHub)

2019-08 SOC - R Symposium (GitHub)

  • Grames_SCO-SOC_slides (pdf)
  • LaZerte_SCO_SOC_2019_en (Rmd | html | pdf)
  • LaZerte_SCO_SOC_2019_fr (Rmd | html | pdf)
  • SCO_2019_naturecounts_R_Ethier_Final (pdf)

2019-05 CRSC - naturecounts (GitHub)

  • LaZerte_CRSC_naturecounts_2019 (Rmd | html | pdf)

2018-08 ISBE (GitHub)

2018-07 Ag Canada - weathercan (GitHub)

  • LaZerte_AGCAN_2018_weathercan (Rmd | html | pdf)

2017-09 PCAG - weathercan (GitHub)

  • LaZerte_PCAG_2017_weathercan (Rmd | html | pdf)
  • LaZerte_PCAG_2017_weathercan_extra (Rmd | html | pdf)

Organized Symposia

2021 - Great R packages for Ornithologists

Organized and invited speakers for this lightning symposium at the 2021-08 Joint meeting of the American Ornithological Society and Society of Canadian Ornithologists / Société des ornithologistes du Canada

Symposium details

  • Steffi LaZerte - “How can ornithologists find R packages?” (GitHub | html | pdf | video)

  • Stepfanie Aguillon - “dplyr: A useful toolbox for manipulating data” (GitHub)

  • Matt Dyson - “sf, raster, and tmap: The spatial data trinity” (GitHub)

  • Mark Padgham - “osmdata: Roadless areas and avian diversity” (GitHub | video)

  • Sunny Tseng - “seewave and tuneR: Sound analysis in ornithology”

  • María Juliana Benítez Saldívar - “warbler and Rraven: Bioacoustics in R”

  • John Quinn - “soundecology: Using acoustic indices for landscape assessment and monitoring”

  • Danielle Ethier - “naturecounts: Millions of bird occurrence records at your fingertips” (pdf)

  • Jessica Burnett - “bbsAssistant: An R package for downloading and handling data and information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey” (Contact for details)

  • Amie MacDonald - “motus: Managing motus data in R”

  • Martin Beal - “track2KBA: An R package for identifying important sites for biodiversity from tracking data”

  • Elena West - “MixSIAR: An R package for avian diet analysis” (pdf)

  • Evan Adams - “INLA: A way for ecologists to overcome their worst impulses”

  • Luke Campillo - “pavo: Color analysis in birds”

  • Philipp Boersch-Supan - “moult and moultmcmc: Inference for moult phenology models” (pdf | transcript)

  • Marc-Olivier Beausoleil - “Putting it all together: Ornithometrics — a task view for ornithology”

2019 - R for Ornithologist: Perspectives from useRs to programmeRs

Organized and invited speakers for this symposium at the 2019-08 Society of Canadian Ornithologists / Société des ornithologistes du Canada

Symposium details

  • Steffi LaZerte - “R for Ornithologists: How R can benefit the study of Ornithology” (GitHub | html EN | pdf EN | html FR | pdf FR

  • Ken A. Otter, Steffi LaZerte & Isobel Hartley - “The blessing and curse of automated data collection: R and dealing with big data in a modern age”

  • Denis LePage, Steffi LaZerte & Danielle Ethier - “naturecounts: a new R package to access standardized data on bird populations” (pdf FR)

  • Adam C. Smith & Brandon P.M. Edwards - “Super-computing with R: Harnessing the power of the cloud to analyze big-bird-data, or just run your simulations, models, and cross-validations faster”

  • Brandon P.M. Edwards, Adam C. Smith, Marie-Anne R. Hudson, Charles M. Francis, Keith L. Pardieck, David J. Ziolkowski Jr. - “bbsBayes: An R package for hierarchical Bayesian modelling of Breeding Bird Survey data”

  • Eliza M. Grames, Andrew N. Stillman, Carolyn V. Mills, Morgan W. Tingley, Chris S. Elphick - “Conducting partially automated systematic reviews with the litsearchr package in R” (pdf EN/FR)

  • Darren S. Proppe - “Using R in the undergraduate biology classroom: Hurdles, hints, and aha moments”