Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools.

rgbif was seven years old yesterday!What is rgbif? rgbif gives you access to data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) via their API.

Programmatic access to biodiversity data is revolutionising large-scale, reproducible biodiversity research. In the marine realm, the largest global database of species occurrence records is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS. As of January 2017, OBIS contains 47.78 million occurrences of 117,345 species, all openly available and accessible via the OBIS API.

finch has just been released to CRAN (binaries should be up soon). finch is a package to parse Darwin Core files. Darwin Core (DwC) is: GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is the biggest holder of biodiversity data.

The iNaturalist project is a really cool way to both engage people in citizen science and collect species occurrence data. The premise is pretty simple, users download an app for their smartphone, and then can easily geo reference any specimen they see, uploading it to the iNaturalist website. It let’s users turn casual observations into meaningful crowdsourced species occurrence data.

UPDATE: mapping functions are in a separate package now (mapr). Examples that do mapping below have been updated. The rOpenSci projects aims to provide programmatic access to scientific data repositories on the web. A vast majority of the packages in our current suite retrieve some form of biodiversity or taxonomic data.

Data on more than 10,000 species of ants recorded worldwide are available through from California Academy of Sciences’ AntWeb, a repository that boasts a wealth of natural history data, digital images, and specimen records on ant species from a large community of museum curators.

Natural history museums have long been valuable repositories of data on species diversity. These data have been critical for fostering and shaping the development of fields such as biogeography and systematics.

This is a guest post by Class-Thido Pfaff We here present the BEFdata R package as part of the rOpenSci project. It is an API package that combines the strengths of the BEFdata portal in handling small, complex datasets with the powerful statics package R. The portal itself is free software as well and can be found here.