Ben Black – Ben<br>Black

A place for me to share updates and insights into my research but also little tips and tricks I find interesting in using R for scientific research

I successfully defended my PhD thesis!

thesis

PhD

research

On the 5th of June 2025, I successfully defended my PhD thesis titled “Identifying effective area-based conservation strategies under uncertainty”. The defence was well…

Creating my own PhD thesis template with Quarto

R

Quarto

Reproducible research

thesis

template

LaTeX

Over the last two years I have really started to use Quarto for everything in my academic work from writing manuscripts, websites for research projects, data dashboards for…

Starting an awesome list for scientific resources

R

Github

Awesome List

Resources

Continuous Integration

In October 2024 I attended a workshop on speeding up the development of useful agent-based land use models. This was a great opportunity for me to engage in a research field…

Upcoming workshop: Reproducible research with R and Quarto

R

Quarto

Reproducible research

FAIR

Landscape conference

workshop

I have been a big fan of R for everything research related for several years and Rstudio has been my go-to IDE all the way from being a complete beginner to my current level…

Automating boring tasks pt. 1: Updating my CV

R

Markdown

Automation

CV

Resume

If you are like me, you only ever find yourself updating your CV when you are actually unemployed and looking for a new job. This is also a task I find especially…

New research project: NASCENT-Peru

Future landscape scenarios

Ecosystem Services

Biodiversity

Peru

SwissRE

Project

NASCENT-Peru

I am excited to be able to introduce a new research project that I will be working on for the next two years: NASCENT-Peru.