Welcome to the evolutionary lottery of skull and beak morphology

#EvoLottery


Beak and skull shapes in birds of prey (“raptors”) are strongly coupled and largely controlled by size.

  • In this exercise, each participant will fork a GitHub repo, and contribute a file required to simulate the evolutionary trajectory of an imaginary species’ body size.

  • We’ll use GitHub to collate all species files and plot them all up together at the end! We’ll also discover the skull and beak shapes associated with each simulated species size.



—

GO!

fork repo

GitHub:

make your own copy of the repository on GitHub

  • fork are linked and traceable


GitHub:

GitHub makes a copy into your account


GitHub:

clone it: copy repo link to initiate Rstudio project



create new project in Rstudio

rstudio:

Create new project


rstudio:

Checkout from version control repository


rstudio:

Clone project from a git repository


rstudio:

Paste repo link copied from GitHub into Repository URL field. Click Create Project.


rstudio:

Rstudio project now contains all files from the GitHub repo.



make a change to the repo

rstudio:

open params/params_tmpl.R


rstudio:

save as new .R script in params/ folder.

Use species name of your choice to name new file. Please !!DO NOT OVERWRITE params/params_tmpl.R!!.


rstudio:

edit file with parameters of your choice and save.



The parameters each participants need to supply are:

NB: remember to save the changes to your file


  • sig2: A numeric value greater than 0 but smaller than 5

  • species.name: a character string e.g. "anas_krystallinus". Try to create a species name out of your name!

  • color: a character string e.g. "red", "#FFFFFF" (tip: pick a color using Rstudio’s Color picker:)


commit changes locally to git

rstudio:

in the git tab, select the new file you created and click Commit. ### !! Please ONLY COMMIT YOUR NEW FILE !!


rstudio:

write an informative commit message and click Commit


push changes to GitHub

rstudio:

on the git tab click ⇧ to push changes to GitHub


rstudio:

changes have now been updated in the GitHub repo



create pull request

GitHub:

in your repository, create new pull request to merge fork to master repo (ie the original repo you forked)


GitHub:

GitHub checks whether your requested merge creates any coflicts. If all is good, click on Create pull request


GitHub:

write an informative message explaining your changes to the master repo administrators. Click on Create pull request


GitHub:

check original repo to see your merged changes




exercise

your mission

We’ll merge all contributions and plot them together at the end!