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. A samping of use cases covered in rgbif: Search for datasets Get metrics on usage of datasets Get metadata about organizations providing data to GBIF Search taxonomic names Get quick taxonomic name suggestions Search occurrences by taxonomic name/country/collector/etc.

One of the goals of the rOpenSci is to facilitate interoperability between different data sources around web with our tools. We can achieve this by providing functionality within our packages that converts data coming down via web APIs in one format (often a provider specific schema) into a standard format. The new version of rWBclimate that we just posted to CRAN does just that.

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.