Welcome to the workshop Spatial Data for Restoration Decision-Making in the Great Green Wall – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
This workshop introduces participants to practical methods for working with restoration data in a notebook environment. It builds on the fundamental concepts of spatial data and data access, progressing towards guided analysis workflows using R in RStudio.
The workshop is designed as a progressive, guided, and applied learning journey. Participants begin by understanding where restoration data come from, how to access them, and how they can be used to support decision-making. They then work through two practical notebooks combining R programming basics, data manipulation, visualisation, and introductory spatial analysis workflows.
What you will do
During the practical sessions, you will:
- Work with real-world datasets derived from LDSF predictive maps
- Learn a simple and reproducible workflow for analysing data
- Explore climate trends, land health, and soil health indicators
- Produce and interpret simple results
Each practical exercise follows the same workflow:
1. Load the data → 2. Explore → 3. Analyse → 4. Visualise → 5. Interpret
The practical notebooks
Day 2 (Tuesday, 29 September 2026)
Notebook 1: R Basics and Climate Data
An introduction to the basics of R and the RStudio development environment, followed by their application to climate datasets.
Day 3 (Wednesday, 30 September 2026)
Notebook 2: Land Health, Soil Health and Spatial Workflows
This notebook builds on the skills developed in the first notebook using land health and soil health datasets, before introducing interactive mapping and introductory spatial analysis workflows.
Data and tools
You will work with small datasets prepared for the workshop and derived from LDSF data. These datasets are provided as tables (CSV files), where each row represents a site and each column represents an indicator.
There are many ways to work with this type of data. In this workshop, we will use:
- RStudio (integrated development environment)
- R for data analysis
Getting started
- Open Notebook 1: R Basics and Climate Data
- Follow the instructions on the notebook page
- Download and open the notebook in RStudio
This first notebook introduces the practical working environment used throughout the workshop: programming with R in RStudio.
Participants begin by learning the basics of working with R, including running code, creating objects, understanding packages and libraries, and loading datasets.
The notebook then applies these skills to climate data, guiding participants through a workflow involving loading, exploring, checking, summarising, and visualising variables such as precipitation and temperature.
By the end of this notebook, participants will be able to produce and save a simple output based on climate data.
This second notebook builds directly on the first. It begins with tabular datasets on land health and soil health, applying the same workflow: loading, checking, transforming, summarising, and visualising the data.
Participants then explore introductory spatial workflows, including creating interactive maps with leaflet, working with spatial data using sf, and, optionally, an introduction to raster data and analysis using terra.
This notebook shows how restoration data can progress from simple tables to maps and spatial summaries within a coherent workflow.
