'How do I apply GAM to an ecological dataset?

I want to make a GAM of counts of each family by Depth for each region. Region is giving me issues because it's a character.

I've tried:

gam(count~ Region s(Depth, by=Region), offset=log(Distance), family= negbin)

This is what one row of my dataset looks like

Region	Depth	Distance	Family
Hawaii	340	100	0.05

Sources

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Solution	Source