R for Earth and Sustainability Data Analytics
A Beginner’s Guide to Earth Data Analytics with GIS, Mapping, Time Series, and Machine Learning in R
From GPS motion and Greenland’s vanishing ice to coastal flooding and global greenhouse-gas emissions, this book teaches you to analyze the data of a changing planet, using R, starting from zero.
Learn to analyze real Earth and environmental data from scratch in R: no prior coding or statistics experience required.
This book is built to break the ice of coding for complete beginners. You start by producing real results, and your confidence grows from there.
Available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
The one-page Quick-Start Cheat Sheet lists the first commands from the book, so you can try them in RStudio right away.
Who this is for
This book is written for students and researchers in environmental science, geology, sustainability, and GIS who are new to R. You do not need any prior programming or statistics background. Each chapter starts with the basics and builds up to working with real Earth data.
What makes this book different
- Start from zero. No prior coding or statistics needed. You begin by installing R and writing your first command.
- Real Earth data from day one. Every method is taught on actual datasets: GPS ground motion, Greenland ice loss, coastal flooding, and global emissions.
- The whole modern toolkit. Data cleaning, GIS and mapping, time series, statistical modeling, and an introduction to machine learning, all in one beginner-friendly path.
- Reproducible and reusable. Download the code and data, run it yourself, and adapt it to your own research.
Built for people who have never coded
We have spent many years teaching R to students in Earth science, sustainability, and business who had never written a line of code, from high schoolers to graduate researchers. That experience shaped every page. We learned a simple lesson: beginners do not struggle with complexity, they struggle with abstraction. The hardest part is usually not the code; it is learning to describe a problem clearly and to solve it with a simple approach, instead of reaching for a complicated model. So this book keeps everything hands-on, shows real results from the very first session, and favors simple methods you fully understand over complex ones you do not.
This approach is deliberate, and it may not look like a traditional R course. To an experienced programmer it can feel unusual. To a true beginner, it is what finally makes coding click. Seeing a real map or a real trend appear on screen early changes everything: it turns “I could never code” into “let me try the next one.”
Learn R · Explore Earth