This is the unofficial course website for the Spring 2021 offering of WILD6900: Applied Bayesian Analysis for Ecological Data 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. If you encounter any issues or have any suggestions, feel free to contact me at clark.rushing [at] usu [dot] edu.

General course information can be found by clicking on the syllabus and schedule links above. Throughout the semester, I will also post lecture notes and lab activities which can be accessed using the drop down menus. I will attempt to post these as far in advance as possible and no later than the day before class.

Course R package

In addition to this website, materials from the course will be distributed through an R package called, you guessed it, WILD6900. 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 WILD6900 with:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("RushingLab/WILD6900")

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).