Tools for this course

Pre-class work

Please complete the following during Week 1 of class. We will devote some time on the second day of class to troubleshoot installations.

  1. Install R and RStudio, following Steps 1 and 2 from this website.

  2. Install Git onto your computer.

  1. If you already have R, RStudio, and Git already available on your computer, verify that you have the most recent versions of each. This is especially important for R, as it is updated regularly (approximately each month). Currently, Gaurav is using R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13 ucrt).a

  2. Create an account on GitLab, which is the remote git server that we will use for this course.1

  3. Follow the steps in this video to authenticate your laptop’s credentials with Gitlab.

  4. Share your gitlab username with Gaurav through email or Discord so that you can be added to the course “group”.

  5. Within R, install the packages rmarkdown, knitr, tidyverse, tinytex, and vegan using the following code:

1 You are also welcome to use GitHub if you prefer, but the steps for completing equivalent tasks may be different than the ones I share in class.

install.packages('rmarkdown')
install.packages('knitr')
install.packages('tidyverse')
install.packages('tinytex')
install.packages('vegan')

In-class slides

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