We are a home for Earth science data and computing professionals. Our sessions bring together the community for hands-on, interdisciplinary deep dives as we explore "Innovation to Impact" this year. Learn more about ESIP: esipfed.org
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Writing code has become an integral component of conducting scientific research, especially as datasets size and complexity have grown. Scientists use code to download and clean data, prepare visualizations, calculate statistics, run models, and more. Just as the use of code in environmental research has grown, so has the ecosystem of tools and techniques for building robust analyses. Libraries in the programming language R have expanded to meet the needs of a growing user base in the scientific community, particularly through the open science community, rOpenSci. In this session, we will focus on a particular package in the rOpenSci ecosystem called ‘targets’, which enables users to build robust, data pipelines that enable reproducible and efficient scientific workflows. We will introduce the concepts of dependency tracking that underpin the package, host an interactive demo to build a small pipeline using ‘targets’, and share a few examples of ‘targets’ pipelines built for large research projects. Attendees should leave this session feeling inspired and equipped to begin constructing data pipelines using ‘targets’ for their own projects.
Value to Session Participants: Session participants will leave with an example of a reproducible workflow, and practice writing and running code with dependency management enabled. This should give them a starting point for future projects that can leverage these techniques.
Recommended Ways to Prepare: Skim the homepage of the ‘targets’ rOpenSci docs to understand the high-level summary and philosophy of this approach at https://docs.ropensci.org/targets/. Consider watching the 4-minute demonstration video that shows an example workflow. If you are not familiar with R functions, please read about them in this R for Data Science chapter at https://r4ds.hadley.nz/functions.html.
