If you are completely new to R and SoilR, there are a few things you have to do first before starting using SoilR.

  • You must download the most recent version of R from the official site.

  • Once you download and install the software in your computer, you can open R and proceed to install SoilR. The easiest way is to type the following command in R

install.packages("SoilR")

This command will install a stable version of the package from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). Sometimes we make small changes to the package to fix bugs or test new functionality and publish early releases of the package in our GitHub repository. To download and install the most recent version from GitHub, use the following code

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github('MPIBGC-TEE/SoilR/pkg')

You will notice that other packages will be installed automatically, they are required by internal functions in SoilR.

  • If you are new to R and programing, you may want to install RStudio. This is a code editor for R that allows you to easily write your code, check out the help pages for functions and vignettes, among many other nice features.

  • You should explore the main papers that describe SoilR functionality. The first paper (Sierra et al., 2012) describes the main idea behind SoilR and its implementation in SoilR. It provides examples about the implementation of popular models such as RothC and ICBM. The second paper (Sierra et al., 2014) describes the implementation of radiocarbon dynamics in SoilR.

  • You should also get familiar with R syntax and main concepts. You will find a large amount of information on the web about R.

References

  1. Sierra, C. A., Müller, M., & Trumbore, S. E. (2014). Modeling radiocarbon dynamics in soils: SoilR version 1.1. Geoscientific Model Development, 7(5), 1919–1931. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-1919-2014
  2. Sierra, C. A., Müller, M., & Trumbore, S. E. (2012). Models of soil organic matter decomposition: the SoilR package, version 1.0. Geosci. Model Dev., 5(4), 1045–1060. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-5-1045-2012