Sharing Soil Health Data with Reproducible Reports in R Markdown

On May 6, 2020, I presented a webinar hosted by the Soil Health Nexus to discuss how I created soil health reports using a parameterized report template in R Markdown.

This approach allowed me to produce individualized reports with soil data for 27 farmers participating in my research project. A similar model could be applied by anyone who wants to create versions of the same general report with different input values and visualizations. Even if you don’t need to create many reports at once like we did, thinking about how you can use R Markdown templates and scripts to automate any data analysis and reporting workflow can vastly increase your efficiency.

Watch a recording of the webinar HERE.

The webinar slides, report template, and scripts are all available for download on Github here. You do not need an account to download materials from Github. If you don’t have an account, simply click on the green “Clone or download” button on the right hand side of the page and select the option to download ZIP (a zip file). Further instructions are provided on the Github page for how to get started with R and R Markdown.

This research is a project of the Minnesota Office for Soil Health, and my work on these reports was adivsed by Dr. Anna Cates.

Citations

Xie, Yihui, Allaire, J.J., and Grolemund, G. (2020). R Markdown: The Definitive Guide Chapter 15: Parameterized Reports. https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/parameterized-reports.html

Atkins, Aron. (2018) “Parameterized R Markdown reports with RStudio Connect” presented at RStudio::Conf 2018. https://rstudio.com/resources/rstudioconf-2018/parameterized-r-markdown-reports-with-rstudio-connect/