Distance Sampling Workshops 2019
This is the site for the Distance Sampling Workshops given in St Andrews, 19th - 30th August, 2019. The course is in three parts:
- Introduction to R for Distance Sampling, 19th - 20th August
- Introduction to Distance Sampling, 21st - 23rd August
- Advanced Distance Sampling, 26th - 30th August
Course materials
- Introduction to R for Distance Sampling
- Introduction to Distance Sampling
- Advanced Distance Sampling
Schedule
Introduction to R for Distance Sampling
Day | Time | Activity |
---|---|---|
Monday | 08:45 | Registration open |
Monday | 09:00-17:00 | Welcome and setup Data types Using R in context Control structures |
Tuesday | 09:00-17:00 | Basic functions Plots Introduction to statistical modelling |
Introduction to Distance Sampling
Day | Time | Activity |
---|---|---|
Wednesday | 08:45 | Registration open |
Wednesday | 09:00 - 17:30 | Welcome Estimating animal abundance Distance sampling Goodness of fit Precision |
Thursday | 09:00 - 17:30 | Point transects Survey design Stratification Multiple covariate distance sampling |
Friday | 09:00 - 17:00 | Indirect methods and multipliers Field methods Wrap up |
Advanced topics in Distance Sampling
Day | Time | Activity |
---|---|---|
Monday | 08:45 | Registration open |
Monday | 09:00 - 17:00 | Welcome Review of distance sampling Density surface modelling |
Tuesday | 09:00 - 17:00 | Density surface modelling |
Wednesday | 09:00 - 17:00 | Density surface modelling |
Thursday | 09:00 - 17:00 | Mark-recapture distance sampling Distance sampling simulation and survey design |
Friday | 09:00 - 17:00 | Research topics Open |
Refresher of distance sampling concepts
The introductory distance sampling course (previously delivered in St Andrews) is now online for free.
Software
Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to use during the workshop practicals. R will be used. To ensure your computer is setup correctly prior to the workshop please check the instructions below.
The course will use R, RStudio and various R packages to be installed from CRAN. The following steps should setup your computer for the workshop:
- Install R from the R website
- Install RStudio from the RStudio website
- Open RStudio and install R packages using the following commands:
# install necessary packages from CRAN
install.packages(c("optimx", "numDeriv", "Rsolnp", "pander", "dplyr",
"mrds", "Distance", "dsm", "DSsim", "dssd",
"ggplot2", "rgdal", "knitr", "plyr", "raster", "reshape2", "viridis",
"bitops", "rmarkdown", "tweedie", "shapefiles", "remotes"))
# install newer versions of the Distance packages from
# github
remotes::install_github("DistanceDevelopment/mrds", type="CRAN")
remotes::install_github("DistanceDevelopment/Distance", type="CRAN")
remotes::install_github("DistanceDevelopment/dsm", type="CRAN")
remotes::install_github("DistanceDevelopment/dsdata", type="CRAN")
There may be quite a lot of packages downloaded in this process, including many not listed here because the packages listed depend upon many other packages. It’s best to run these one line at a time, in case R needs confirmation between steps.