Data Analysis Exercise for BIO 298

Explore the wolf-moose data set from Isle Royale, which is available here:

Isle Royale Dataset (Excel version). This is a extensive data set that includes, among other things, population and demographic data on wolves and moose, climate data and data on the island’s balsam fir population for every year from 1959 through 2011.

Use it to create 3 figures: at least one must be a scatter plot and one must be a histogram. If you can, try to also do a box plot. Use professional standards–properly label axes and provide a proper caption. Be prepared to show and interpret your graphs in class.

To enter it into R, make sure that R’s working directory is set to the location where the data frame is saved. Then use Excel’s “Save as” function to save it as a .csv file. (Make sure it saves to the same directory.) Then from R’s command prompt, type the following exactly as shown:

main = read.csv(“isleroyale_data.csv”, header = T)

attach(main)

Then you should have it loaded into R’s work space where you can work on it.

Isle Royale Wolf-Moose System: On the right-hand side bar of this page, look for “Graph Data.” Under this heading it says, “Download an Excel file containing the data for each of the graphs on this page.” Underneath that is a download button.