r4wrds

Throughout my PhD I often wished I had a data science textbook (like r4ds) designed specifically for problems in water resources. Recently, @riverpeek and I were given the opportunity to build such a course for the California Water Board, and so we created r4wrds.com (R for Water Resources Data Science). We hope that academic, governmental, and private audiences find something useful in the material and examples we cover.

Water resources is a broad field encompassing many specialties, from urban to rural management, from quantity to quality, and from surface to groundwater. As a field, we face modern challenges posed by aging infrastructure, a changing climate, population growth, unsustainable demand, and contamination. These interconnected challenges demand modern, shareable, scalable solutions. r4wrds provides a foundation in reproducible data science to address those challenges.

At the time of writing (2021-07-28), two courses are available: intro and intermediate. The Intro course is meant to be followed linearly, and the intermediate course can be read out of order based on interest. The entire course is open source and availble on Github. We welcome new issues, or if you’re up for it, a PR!