Robert William Schlegel

Data Scientist

LOV

Biography

Robert Schlegel is a Data Scientist on the OMTAB team at the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefrance where he is working on the RiOMar and HYPERNETS projects.

Interests

Marine heatwaves
Climate change
Biodiversity
Machine learning
Data science

Education

PhD in Biodiversity, 2018

University of the Western Cape
MPhil in Marine Science, 2014

University of Cape Town
BA in Animal Behaviour, 2008

University of Washington

Publications

More Publications

RW Schlegel, RK Singh, B Gentili, S Bélanger, LC de la Guardia, D Krause-Jensen, CA Miller, M Sejr, J-P Gattuso (2024). Underwater light environment in Arctic fjords. ESSD.

PDF Code Dataset Project

RW Schlegel, J-P Gattuso (2023). A dataset for investigating socio-ecological changes in Arctic fjords. ESSD.

PDF Code Dataset

RW Schlegel, I Bartsch, K Bischof, LR Bjørst, H Dannevig, N Diehl, P Duarte, GK Hovelsrud, T Juul-Pedersen, A Lebrun, L Merillet, C Miller, C Ren, M Sejr, JE Søreide, TR Vonnahme, J-P Gattuso (2023). Drivers of change in Arctic fjord socio-ecological systems: Examples from the European Arctic. Cambridge Prisms: Coastal Futures.

PDF Code Dataset

J Garrabou, D Gómez-Gras, A Medrano, C Cerrano, M Ponti, RW Schlegel, N Bensoussan, E Turicchia, … +62 (2022). Marine heatwaves drive recurrent mass mortalities in the Mediterranean Sea. Global Change Biology.

PDF Code

K Filbee-Dexter, KA MacGregor, C Lavoie, I Garrido, J Goldsmit, LC de la Guardia, KL Howland, LE Johnson, Brenda Konar, CW McKindsey, CJ Mundy, RW Schlegel, P Archambault (2022). Sea Ice and Substratum Shape Extensive Kelp Forests in the Canadian Arctic. Front Mar Sci.

Code Source Document

Packages

The R packages I’ve created/maintain

FjordLight

An R package to aid in accessing the fjord PAR data product created for the FACE-IT project.

heatwave3

An R package for the detection of heatwaves and cold-spells directly on NetCDF files.

heatwaveR

An R package for the detection of heatwaves and cold-spells.

coastR

An R package with useful functions for coastal oceanography.

Projects

FjordLight

A methodology, dataset, and accompanying R package to quantify the light environment within the waters of Arctic fjords.

Demo for the MHW definition

An interactive application that allows the user to explore the components of the MHW definition.

Marine heatwave tracker

A daily updating web application for tracking the occurrence of marine heatwaves around the globe.

Blog Posts

ODV figures in R with bathymetry

Objective Nearly four years after writing a blog post about recreating R figures in ODV I had someone reach out to me expressing interest in adding a bathymetry layer over the interpolated data. It’s always nice to know that these blog posts are being found useful for other researchers. And I have to admit I’m a bit surprised that the code still runs 4 years later. Especially considering that it uses the tidyverse which is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility.

2020-06-18 13 min read R

Analysis of Bio-Oracle data

Objective While running some brief quality control tests on Bio-Oracle layers before using them for a recent project it was detected that some of the layers in the current version of the Bio-Oracle product appear to have very large errors. Specifically the error is that there are layers where the minimum values are greater than the maximum values. It is unclear how this could be possible, so in the following text and code we will look into how we go about investigating these data layers and we will discuss which layers are fine, and which are not.

2020-02-14 13 min read R

Downloading environmental data in R

Objective Having been working in environmental science for several years now, entirely using R, I’ve come to greatly appreciate environmental data sources that are easy to access. If you are reading this text now however, that probably means that you, like me, have found that this often is not the case. The struggle to get data is real. But it shouldn’t be. Most data hosting organisations do want scientists to use their data and do make it freely available.

2018-07-17 13 min read R

South Africa time survey

Objective In South Africa there are a range of idioms for different time frames in which someone may (or may not) do something. The most common of these are: ‘now’, ‘just now’, and ‘now now’. If one were to Google these sayings one would find that there is general agreements on how long these time frames are, but that agreement is not absolute. This got me to wondering just how much disagreement there may be around the country.

2017-12-08 8 min read R

Transects

Preface This week I have expanded the coastR package with the inclusion of a function that calculates the angle of the heading for alongshore or shore-normal transects. The rest of this blog post is the vignette that I’ve written detailing the set of this function. Next week I’ll likely be taking a break from coastR development to finally create a package for the SACTN dataset. That is a project that has been in the works for a loooong time and it will be good to finally see a development release available to the public.