We hope you have enjoyed a peaceful and recreational festive season and already had a great start to your 2025. Our year starts with a big thank you to three Zurich R community legends, a new team of organizers and a ‘Geodata and Landscape Insights with R’ meetup at WSL…
For the R user group Zurich, the end of 2024 brought one of the biggest changes in almost a decade: After 8 years and more than 40 (!!) meetups, Muriel, Rachel and Dorothea said Farewell to an Incredible Journey with the Zurich R User Group (RUG). We would like to use this platform to say thanks for your creativity, your effort and your endurance that were so crucial to making the Zurich R user group what it is today: One of the largest and most established tech meetups in the Zurich Greater area. Literally thousands of members benefitted from the events and the network at large.
We — that’s Aurelien, Gerlinde, Matt, Mike, Minna and Sereina — are excited to contribute to the great tradition of R meetups in the Zurich Greater area and the chance to bring useRs together. To learn more about us, our approach and future developments, explore our new website on https://zurich-r-user-group.github.io and make sure to come to one of our meetups!
The next meetup takes place at WSL Birmensdorf, Englersaal on January 23 from 6:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. and will feature two talks: Dominique Weber, technical staff member, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) will speak about Ecological infrastructure planning:
The development of an ecological infrastructure supports the long-term protection and promotion of biodiversity in Switzerland. We support the Canton of Zurich in this planning and use R to process and analyze extensive and mainly open geodata on protected areas and their connectivity, and to model potential new areas. In this presentation we will show how we have used R to build a reproducible geospatial processing pipeline and what we have learned in the process.
Micah Wilhelm, scientific assistant at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL presents the FORTE app — an online tool for forests today and tomorrow:
Over the years, the need for accurate and accessible data on forest conditions and future projections has grown in Switzerland. The Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL has responded with tools like FORTE Now and FORTE Future, which aggregate real-time and predictive data on tree growth, water stress, defoliation, and habitat suitability for over 30 tree species. These R Shiny applications empower users to explore forest health and climate resilience from local to national scales, illustrating the current and future impacts of climate change. Additionally, educational versions for young students were developed using fictional narratives to underscore the societal effects and adaptive strategies needed for forest sustainability.