Preliminary Report on Rat population

Prompt: The island of Nictopia has a black rat (Rattus rattus) problem. The island had an introduced population
of rats on a poorly monitored ship 10 years ago and since then the rat population had skyrocketed resulting a
number of perceived problems. The Nictopia department of public health wants to try to control the negative
effects – but there is not any firm evidence about what effects of the rats are significant and which ones are
hearsay.
present a preliminary report (~2 pages) on the effects of the black rat that actually should be pursued.
they suggest you review the datasets and choose which three to perform.
Your goal is to produce a preliminary report on three issues you think might be particularly important. To
complete this you need to:
1) Write a short (1-3 paragraphs) justifying what analyses you are using on which dataset and which question
you think each will address. Provide the null and alternate hypothesis for tests that produce a p-value – in
words – that describe what you will be comparing.
2) Provide the results of your analyses and the R scripts you generate. Be sure to provide the test statistics
(t/F) and p-values for hypothesis tests as well as key values (r,R,PC variance) and graphics for
correlation/regression/PCA. (You can also use summary statistics/confidence and prediction intervals but will
need to report more values). Be sure that you include figure captions for your graphics.
3) Write a 2-5 paragraph summary – referencing your results and figures – to summarize your findings. Make
sure to reference these back to the key concerns of the community and make a final recommendation for the
next steps based on your findings.