Lab 3: Modeling density-dependent growth

WILD3810: Plant and animal populations

Spring 2020

In the last homework assignment, you used an exponential growth model to predict the abundance of Eurasian collared-doves in Utah 20 years in the future. The model model predicted an average of 14,000 collared-doves at each BBS route, which is obviously way more doves than we expect to actually occur in Utah in 2035. At some point, resources will become limiting and population growth will slow.

In this lab, we will use BBS data from other states where collared-doves were introduced earlier than in Utah to explore what happens to this species as populations grow beyond their initially small sizes.

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Objectives

• Model and visualize density-dependent population growth

• Learn/review basic data manipulation tasks, including:
  • Subsetting vectors
  • Creating and subsetting data frames
  • Create summaries of raw data
  • Saving data
• R functions used in this exercise:
  • library()
  • data()
  • head()
  • str()
  • summary()
  • nrow()
  • dplyr::select()
  • dplyr::filter()
  • ggplot2::ggplot()
  • data.frame()
  • for()
  • dplyr::bind_rows()
  • dplyr::mutate()

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This week, we will combine the in-class lab activity with homework 3. To create this homework:

1. Log in to R Studio Cloud

2. Create a new project called LastnameFirstname-Lab3

3. Create a new R Markdown file from the Homework-2 template:

   3a) Click File -> New File -> R Markdown

   3b) Click From Template and scroll down to WILD3810-Homework3

   3c) In the Name box, type LastnameFirstname-Homework3

   3d) Click Ok

4. Ensure that you can Knit the file

   4a) Change “YOUR NAME HERE” in the header section to your name

   4b) Click Knit to make sure you can knit the .Rmd file

5. Complete the assignment as directed in the .Rmd file

6. Follow the instructions for submission to upload your completed assignment to Canvas