UC Merced -
Spring 2023

Data Science Research Biology: An intro to programming with R for ecology and evolution

Creative Commons License

Bird Banding


The number of birds banded at a series of sampling sites has been counted by your field crew and entered into the following vector. Counts are entered in order and sites are numbered starting at one. Cut and paste the vector into your assignment and then answer the following questions by using code and printing the result to the screen. Some R functions that will come in handy include length(), max(), min(), sum(), and mean().

number_of_birds <- c(28, 32, 1, 0, 10, 22, 30, 19, 145, 27, 
36, 25, 9, 38, 21, 12, 122, 87, 36, 3, 0, 5, 55, 62, 98, 32, 
900, 33, 14, 39, 56, 81, 29, 38, 1, 0, 143, 37, 98, 77, 92, 
83, 34, 98, 40, 45, 51, 17, 22, 37, 48, 38, 91, 73, 54, 46,
102, 273, 600, 10, 11)
  1. How many sites are there?
  2. How many birds were counted at site 42?
  3. What is the total number of birds counted across all of the sites?
  4. What is the smallest number of birds counted?
  5. What is the largest number of birds counted?
  6. What is the average number of birds seen at a site?
  7. How many birds were counted at the last site? Have the computer choose the last site automatically in some way, not by manually entering its position. Do you know a function that will give you the position of the last value? (since positions start at 1 the position of the last value in a vector is the same as its length).