CPEG 2025 Workshop

Building Open Data Science Skills in Paleobiology and Ecology

WORKSHOP MATERIALS CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

July 27th, 2025

University of Zürich (Zürich, Switzerland)

Welcome

R is one of the most popular languages in the world of data science and has been widely adopted by the paleobiological and ecological communities for data analysis. General familiarity with R allows users to automate routine tasks, create reproducible analytical workflows, and expand the potential of their research. This workshop aims to introduce participants to the versatility of R for cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing paleobiological and ecological data. It will cover topics including: data acquisition from biodiversity databases such the Paleobiology Database, Neotoma Paleoecology Database, and Global Biodiversity Information Facility; building workflows in R to clean and analyze data; data visualization and synthesis; and guidelines (e.g., FAIR and CARE principles) and tools (e.g., GitHub) for creating more reproducible code and accessible documentation. In doing so, this workshop will introduce attendees to palaeoverse, an R package that supports data preparation and exploration for paleobiological analysis. Participants will also become familiar with additional packages developed by Palaeoverse www.palaeoverse.org, such as rphylopic. More broadly, this event aims to connect participants working in different fields who share a common interest in data science and provide a platform for participants to gain experience working collaboratively in R to generate reproducible interdisciplinary research.

Arrival

The event starts at XXX on the XXX and will take place at XXX.

The full schedule for the workshop is available here.

Schedule

Time Event
PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER
PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER
PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER
PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER
PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER
PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER

Instructors

This edition of the Workshop event is organised and led by the following members of the Palaeoverse team.

INSTRUCTOR 1

INSTRUCTOR 2

INSTRUCTOR 3

Installation

Please ensure that you have the latest version of R for the workshop, which can be downloaded here. We also recommend installing the latest version of RStudio, which can be downloaded here. To minimize any installation issues during the workshop, please also install the following R packages:

install.packages()

Acknowledgements

This event is run by the Palaeoverse and supported by…