if the primary purpose is to teach basic R, then it seems like the tutorial is fine. it covers the many of the basics of working with CSV data, filtering, aggregating, and visualizing (line graph, bar chart, map). my main criticism here would be that some of the examples don’t seem like they are very practical in the real world. for example, in your lesson on filtering using the OR operator, you show people how to filter for observations where user_login == xxx or common_name == yyy, and that doesn’t seem like something anyone would actually ever do.
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however, if the primary purpose is to show folks how to work with iNat data (as opposed to teaching basic R), it seems to me like most things in the tutorial covers could be done more efficiently in a different way. in particular, downloading a ton of observations just to aggregate the data or create a basic visualization often is not necessary. especially around CNC time, trying to export observations in the standard interface often takes a lot of time. so there are faster / better ways to get a quick count or bar chart or list of top users, etc.
just for example:
- something like this is probably the best way to do a quick graph or chart of observation counts over time in R: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/1m-observations-this-month/2582/4
- if you just want to quickly visualize distributions on a map in R, you could do something like this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/api-project-heatmap-using-r-and-quarto-html/57793/5