Further AI reading
Other tutorials, blogs, and articles
Leveraging Generative AI: Applications for the LTER Network
AI for research: the ultimate guide to choosing the right tool
Github copilot for beginners blog
Chris Brown’s Blog has a lot of useful tips for ecologists getting started with AI. His Article and Tutorial on using LLMs for ecological statistics are good reading if you want to delve into this realm (but see Danger Zone).
Copilot in VS code cheat sheet
Helpful tips on prompt engineering
Shiny app for drafting prompts (R-focused)
Alternatives to vscode
- Cursor AI-assisted IDE
- Many more!
AI agents
AI-assisted software development tools that code in the background while you work on other things.
GitHub Copilot Agent (Microsoft)
Claude code (Anthropic)
Gemini code assist (Google)
Codex (OpenAI)
Should I be worried about my carbon footprint?
Absolutely! We should all be working hard to lower our carbon emissions.
Realistically, the energy use of using AI tools probably pales in comparison to most of your activities. If you want to meaningfully reduce your carbon impact, consider skipping your next plane trip or use any number of online climate action tools to calculate where your biggest impact is. It probably won’t be your AI use.