McDonald Data Sciences Blog

Blogging R and environmental statistics topics

Extracting Tracks from KML

GPS tracks from KML via XML

R

Spatial

XML

R is amazing at geospatial analysis. Most…

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…

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 CRAN checks and is easily…

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…

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…

Parallel Raster Processing

Drastically reduce processing of large rasters

R

Spatial

Recently, I needed to extract raster values over polygons. The raster was huge (22.2 million cells) and the number of polygons was huge (83 thousand). I calculated the the…

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.