Tutorials

Paleolimnologists have been using the Constant Rate of Supply (CRS) and Constant Initial Concentration (CIC) model to interpret 210Pb dates for a very long time. Some variations like propagating error using a Monte Carlo simulation (Binford 1990 and Sanchez-Cabeza et al.

Inspired by @gshotwell, I decided to have a look into bulk translating a ton of functions to SQL. The dplyr system to translate R code to SQL is really cool, but I’ve had some trouble in the past using it to write backend-agnostic code because of slightly different implementations of functions in different database backends.

I’m an avid Twitter follower of Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600), who is a prolific tweeter of maps (all sorts). The other day I saw this tweet, which links to a reddit thread that used the PRISM dataset to make an animated map of precipitation in the US.

The recent grounding of almost all Boeing 737 MAX-series aircraft in the world is, according to a recent CBC commentator, unprecedented. I’m not an aircraft expert (or even a hobbyist), but I do love data and mining publicly-available datasets.

A side project of mine recently has been to play with PHREEQC, which is a powerful geochemical modelling platform put out by the USGS. In order to make the R package for phreeqc more accessible, I’ve started to wrap a few common uses of PHREEQC in a new R package, tidyphreeqc.

This post covers creating stratigraphic diagrams using ggplot2, highlighting the helpers contained within the tidypaleo package, which I’ve been using for the past few months to create diagrams. I chose the ggplot2 framework because it is quite flexible and can be used to create almost any time-stratigraphic diagram except ones that involve multiple axes (we can have a fight about whether or not those are appropriate anyway, but if you absolutely need to create them I suggest you look elsewhere).

It is an exciting time for the integration of limnological and paleolimnological datasets. The National (US) Water Quality Monitoring Council Water Quality Portal has just made decades of state and federal water quality measurements available, the Pages2k project has collected hundreds of temperature proxy records for the last 2000 (ish) years, and the Neotoma database provides access to a large number of paleoecological datasets.

Working with radiocarbon dating in R has long been possible, especially since the Intcal dataset itself contains R code in the supplement. Other tools like Bacon (Blauuw and Christen 2011), the slightly simpler Clam (Blaauw 2010), and BChron (Haslett and Parnell 2008) have helped users calibrate radiocarbon dates and produce reproducible age models.

There is a very old issue in ggplot2 about the ability to modify particular scales when using facet_wrap() or facet_grid(). I often have this problem when using lots of facets, as sometimes the labels overlap with eachother on some of the scales.

There is a lot of talk about the ggplot2 package and the pipe. Should it be used? Some approaches, like the ggpipe package, replace many ggplot2 functions, adding the plot as the first argument so they can be used with the pipe.