Tree in HKK plot

Resources

 

ForestGEO staff and collaborators have identified the following resources as helpful to their work in mentoring students and early-career researchers. They are organized into three topics: science writing, software support, and statistical analysis. Click the + next to each category to explore these topics and review descriptions of each resource.

Most of these resources are meant for beginners. When a resource is intended for advanced-level practitioners we have indicated so with the following symbol: (A).

"How to write a scientific paper" is a short blog post from ConservationBytes.com that outlines an 11-step process that goes through conducting research, mind-mapping initial thoughts, creating figures, and circulating final drafts for feedback.

"How to construct a Nature summary paragraph" is a color-coded diagram that details how to write an abstract according to the Nature guide to authors.

"Ten simple rules for structuring papers" is an 8-page editorial in PLOS Computational Biology that provides straightforward guidelines for writing scientific papers and explains why those rules are important. Although aimed at students who are learning to write a scientific paper, it can also serve as a helpful review of how to navigate a scientific paper as a reader.

"Writing a research article: advice to beginners" is a short article in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care that explains the sections of a scientific paper and contains two summary tables that show typical manuscript structure and common mistakes.

"Intro to R" is a series of short (2-5 minutes) videos from Google Developers that begin with basic orientation to R and become increasingly specialized.

R Crash Course is a 40-page introduction to R by Colin T. Kremer. It includes a detailed table of contents that allows you to navigate quickly to the section you need to reference..

An Introduction to R is a 100-page text by W. N. Venables, D. M. Smith, and the R Core Team that provides a comprehensive tutorial on R and its functions.

"Tools & Learning Resources" is a short list of resources from ForestGEO’s Ecosystems and Climate Lab to help you get started with scientific data and project management, R and R Studio, GitHub, and various reference managers.

"Hello World" is a 5-step introduction to GitHub complete with screenshots to help you learn the basic functions (creating branches, committing changes, opening and merging pull requests) of the platform.

Stack Overflow is an open platform for finding answers to computer programming questions. Users can submit a question or search a database of already answered questions to quickly receive advice on R programming challenges.

(A) "A Tutorial on Loops in R - Usage and Alternatives" is an in-depth blog post from r-bloggers.com with extensive code examples.

(A) "GLMM FAQ" is very detailed guide to generalized linear mixed-effect models from Ben Bolker.

(A) "GLMM worked examples" show detailed examples of how to implement generalized mixed-effect models in R from a book chapter in Ecological Statistics: Contemporary Theory and Application.

The ForestGEO Arthropod Database requires (free!) registration and provides access to records on more than 910,000 specimens from Barro Colorado Island (Panama), Khao Chong (Thailand), and Wanang (Papua New Guinea) FDPs.

The ForestGEO Climate Data Portal is both a directory of climate data relevant to ForestGEO sites and a repository of climate data for ForestGEO sites.  It is a product of the ForestGEO Ecosystems and Climate Lab.

allodb provides a standardized, reproducible approach to estimating extratropical tree biomass based on a multitude of published allometric equations. The first version of allodb (2021) includes the best-known allometries for 24 extratropical ForestGEO sites, and allodb is flexible to allow addition of new equations.  Read about it in Gonzalez-Akre, et al.

Do you have a resource that could be helpful to the ForestGEO network? Feel free to suggest new items that will be reviewed for possible addition by emailing us at forestgeo@si.edu.