Chapter 2 Prerequisites

Students are encouraged to install the software R for statistical programming (R Core Team 2020) and the user interface for R RStudio (RStudio Team 2020). On-line documentation and tutorials are available for R. This documentation uses the R packages markdown (Allaire et al. 2020) and bookdown (Xie 2020). Installation of these packages is not required to complete the tasks but students are encourage to try them out. The Rmd code can be viewed any time by clicking on the eye-symbol at the top of the page.

The following R packages are used in this documentation and need to be installed in R prior to running the code:

# The tidy family library for data wrangling
library(tidyverse, quietly=TRUE)

# Reading data from excel
library(readxl, quietly=TRUE)

# For date-time handling
library(lubridate, quietly=TRUE)

# Spatial data plotting 
library(leaflet, quietly=TRUE)

# Nice coloring of plots
library(viridis, quietly=TRUE) 

# Interpolation of time series
library(zoo, quietly=TRUE)

# A variety of methods to estimate evapotranspiration
library(Evapotranspiration, quietly=TRUE)

References

Allaire, JJ, Yihui Xie, Jonathan McPherson, Javier Luraschi, Kevin Ushey, Aron Atkins, Hadley Wickham, Joe Cheng, Winston Chang, and Richard Iannone. 2020. Rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown.

R Core Team. 2020. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.

RStudio Team. 2020. RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for R. Boston, MA: RStudio, PBC. http://www.rstudio.com/.

Xie, Yihui. 2020. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=bookdown.