tidywater (water chemistry) and building packages using base R

Libby McKenna and Sierra Johnson - Brown and Caldwell

Introduction to the tidywater package
Our package (available on CRAN), tidywater, consolidates public models for water treatment modeling. This package was developed to address the need for a common modeling platform for our industry, drinking water engineering, which previously required assembling results from multiple tools. Additionally, an R Shiny webapp was developed for people who want to access the models, but don't have the time to learn R.

Libby recently presented at posit::conf 2025 in Atlanta

Peter DeWitt CU Anshutz/ NREL

I'll see you data.table and tidyverse and raise you base R

The tools for data manipulation provided by the tidyverse's dplyr and tidyr are extremely useful, as are dcast, melt, and the set* methods for data.table. However, there is an argument to be made that base R, in some cases, can be preferable to either of these popular R dialects. In this presentation we will explore a specific example where base R methods can be preferable and how to build R packages to support different dialects without dependencies or imports.

Peter in the news -> CU Anschutz Makes Research Tools Available Worldwide

Typically - we gather at 6:30, chat, talks begin at 7. Each talk with discussion will last about 30 minutes.