R Shiny

I’ve had the opportunity to create some fun apps using R Shiny and am excited to create more! I particularly appreciate that Shiny apps can be used to make R content accessible to those without an R background and have strived to leverage that value in the apps I have written so far.

lterpalettefinder Shiny Explorer

I am currently a data scientist working with the Long Term Ecological Research Network Office (aka LNO). While my primary role is to support synthesis working groups, I also am encouraged to pursue programming tasks that are interesting to me and may indirectly improve my ability to aid working groups.

One such side project is the R package lterpalettefinder (one of the R packages I’ve created). This package began as a straightforward way of allowing R users to include color palettes manually extracted from photos taken at LTER sites but over time evolved into developing functions to do that extraction automatically.

This app provides a non-R interface to explore the package and pull palettes from their own photos. My hope is that this framework allows those without R knowledge to still make use of lterpalettefinder.

The code for the data portal can be found on GitHub here

Herbivory Variability Network Data Portal

The Herbivory Variability Network (aka HerbVar) is a relatively new Research Coordination Network (RCN) focused on understanding the ecological and phylogenetic drivers of variation in herbivore damage around the globe. HerbVar is housed at Michigan State University and led by Dr. Will Wetzel. While working as their data scientist / network administrator I leapt at the chance to use Shiny to create a data submission portal.

The data portal collects various metadata about the data being submitting and performs some preliminary QA/QC. The app doesn’t reject data that has errors but does–politely–flag any identified issues for the user to (hopefully) address and re-attach data. Attached data are then uploaded to a Google Drive folder and entered metadata are added as a new row to a dynamic GoogleSheet for downstream use.

The code for the data portal can be found on GitHub here