Posts

Objective Nearly four years after writing a blog post about recreating R figures in ODV I had someone reach out to me expressing interest in adding a bathymetry layer over the interpolated data. It’s always nice to know that these blog posts are being found useful for other researchers. And I have to admit I’m a bit surprised that the code still runs 4 years later. Especially considering that it uses the tidyverse which is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility.

CONTINUE READING

Objective While running some brief quality control tests on Bio-Oracle layers before using them for a recent project it was detected that some of the layers in the current version of the Bio-Oracle product appear to have very large errors. Specifically the error is that there are layers where the minimum values are greater than the maximum values. It is unclear how this could be possible, so in the following text and code we will look into how we go about investigating these data layers and we will discuss which layers are fine, and which are not.

CONTINUE READING

Objective Having been working in environmental science for several years now, entirely using R, I’ve come to greatly appreciate environmental data sources that are easy to access. If you are reading this text now however, that probably means that you, like me, have found that this often is not the case. The struggle to get data is real. But it shouldn’t be. Most data hosting organisations do want scientists to use their data and do make it freely available.

CONTINUE READING

Objective In South Africa there are a range of idioms for different time frames in which someone may (or may not) do something. The most common of these are: ‘now’, ‘just now’, and ‘now now’. If one were to Google these sayings one would find that there is general agreements on how long these time frames are, but that agreement is not absolute. This got me to wondering just how much disagreement there may be around the country.

CONTINUE READING

Preface This week I have expanded the coastR package with the inclusion of a function that calculates the angle of the heading for alongshore or shore-normal transects. The rest of this blog post is the vignette that I’ve written detailing the set of this function. Next week I’ll likely be taking a break from coastR development to finally create a package for the SACTN dataset. That is a project that has been in the works for a loooong time and it will be good to finally see a development release available to the public.

CONTINUE READING

Objective Whilst cruising about on Imgur I found a post about science stuff. Not uncommon, which is nice. These sorts of grab-bag posts about nothing in particular often include some mention of climate science, almost exclusively some sort of clever visualisation of a warming planet. That seems to be what people are most interested in. I’m not complaining though, it keeps me employed. The aforementioned post caught my attention more than usual because it included a GIF, and not just a static picture of some sort of blue thing that is becoming alarmingly red (that was not meant to be a political metaphor).

CONTINUE READING

Preface The rest of the blog post after this preface section is a copy of the vignette I’ve written for the first function in the new package I am developing: coastR. This package aims to provide functions that are useful for coastal oceanography but that do not yet exist in the R language. It is not my intention to provide algorithms for physical oceanography as these may already be found elsewhere.

CONTINUE READING

Objective There are many different things that require scientists to use programming languages (like R). Far too many to count here. There is however one common use amongst almost all environmental scientists: mapping. Almost every report, research project or paper will have need to refer to a study area. This is almost always “Figure 1”. To this end, whenever I teach R, or run workshops on it, one of the questions I am always prepared for is how to create a map of a particular area.

CONTINUE READING

Objective A few weeks ago for a post about the relationship between gender equality and GDP/ capita I found a nifty website that has a massive amount of census information for most countries on our planet. Much of this information could be used to answer some very interesting and/ or important questions. But some of the data can be used to answer seemingly pointless questions. And that’s what I intend to do this week.

CONTINUE READING

Objective As an immigrant myself, all of the talk of immigration to be found in main stream media outlets today makes me a bit nervous. Whereas most people that speak of the pro’s and con’s of immigration do so from the point of view of how it may affect the country of their birth, I view this issue as something that affects my ability to live outside the country of my birth.

CONTINUE READING