This is the unofficial course website for the Spring 2021 offering of WILD3810: Plant and Animal Populations at Utah State University. This website is built using the R package pkgdown and is a slightly experimental attempt to use pkgdown to create a course website. For that reason, the “official” course website (for students enrolled in the course) will remain on Canvas.

The goal of using pkgdown is to create a central repository for students to access all course materials - lecture slides, lab activities, assignment templates, code, data, etc. A secondary goal is to make those materials freely available to other students and instructors who may find them useful. As I mentioned, this is a bit of an experiment so please bear with me as the site comes together. If you encounter any issues or have any suggestions, feel free to contact me at clark.rushing [at] usu [dot] edu.

Course R package

In addition to this website, materials from the course will be distributed through an R package called, you guessed it, WILD3810. The main purpose of the R package is to distribute code and data that will used for the course, though eventually additional materials may be included, including lectures and reference documents. You can install the most current version of WILD3810 with:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("RushingLab/WILD3810")

Use of material

Materials included in this course is purposefully made available to anyone who finds it useful. Users are free to use, adapt, distribute, display, and communicate these materials freely. If you find these materials useful, please let me know, especially if you are using or adapting these materials for teaching. Tracking use of these materials outside of the offical course is not only great validation for my effort, it helps me demonstrate “a positive professional reputation in teaching” (which happens to be useful for promotion).