Getting Started

Although Excel or similar programs work for basic analyses, many scientists use programs like R (often in the RStudio environment) for larger datasets or more sophisticated analyses.

MERMAID has a helpful R package for accessing and importing your data.

The R package mermaidr is specifically made for working with MERMAID data, which includes assessing your data, compiling datasets from multiple projects, and ingesting legacy data. To help you use the mermaidr package, we have prepared examples that can be accessed through the links below:

1. Accessing project data

2. Analysing MERMAID data using WCS Vibrant Oceans Baseline Coral Reef Monitoring

3. Ingesting legacy data into MERMAID using fishbelt data

For more information and detailed instructions on the mermaidr package usage, see the package website and the list of package functions.

New to programming in R? Our new R users guide is a great place to start.

After going through some basics, we recommend visiting the seascape models website. They have a lot of courses using R, from introduction to R to modeling, and they use marine data, which makes it easier to learn from as we are familiar with analysing marine data. A course that we would recommend to start with is the Cleaning ecological survey data for conservation scientists, where they use reef fish data.