eBird is an online tool for recording birdobservations. The eBird database currently contains over 500 millionrecords of bird sightings, spanning every country and nearly every birdspecies, making it an extremely valuable resource for bird research andconservation. These data can be used to map the distribution andabundance of species, and assess how species’ ranges are changing overtime. This dataset is available for download as a text file;

Motivation A few weeks ago, as part of the rOpenSci Unconference, a group of us (Sean Hughes, Malisa Smith, Angela Li, Ju Kim, and Ted Laderas) decided to work on making the UMAP algorithm accessible within R. UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a dimensionality reduction technique that allows the user to reduce high dimensional data (multiple columns) into a smaller number of columns for visualization purposes (github,

The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF images with thousands of colors per frame and do so much faster than other software.

R packages are widely used in science, yet the code behind them often does not come under scrutiny. To address this lack, rOpenSci has been a pioneer in developing a peer review process for R packages. The goal of pkginspector is to help that process by providing a means to better understand the internal structure of R packages.

Evolutionary biologists are increasingly using R for building,editing and visualizing phylogenetic trees.The reproducible code-based workflow and comprehensive array of toolsavailable in packages such as ape,phangorn andphytools make R an ideal platform forphylogenetic analysis.Yet the many different tree formats are not well integrated,as pointed out in a recentpost.

It’s easy to come to a conference and feel intimidated by the wealth of knowledge and expertise of other attendees. As Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and writer describes, One of the best ways to start feeling less intimidated is to start talking to others. Ullman continues, At rOpenSci unconf18, we learned that it’s ok to feel like you don’t know everything – indeed, that’s how just about everyone feels!

Data == knowledge! Much of the data we use, whether it be fromgovernment repositories, social media, GitHub, or e-commerce sites comesfrom public-facing APIs. The quantity of data available is trulystaggering, but munging JSON output into a format that is easilyanalyzable in R is an equally staggering undertaking.

Introduction I never thought that I’d be programming software in my career. I startedusing R a little over 2 years now and it’s been one of the most importantdecisions in my career. Secluded in a small academic office with no oneto discuss/interact about my new hobby, I started searching the web fortutorials and packages. After getting to know how amazing and nurturingthe R community is, it made me want to become a data scientist.

Have you ever needed to connect to a remote server over SSH to transfer files via SCP or to setup a secure tunnel, and wished you could do so from R itself? The new rOpenSci ssh package provides a native ssh client in R allows you to do that and even more, like running a command or script on the host while streaming stdout and stderr directly to the client. The package is based on libssh, a powerful C library implementing the SSH protocol.

The drake R package is not only a reproducible research solution, but also a serious high-performance computing engine. The package website introduces drake, and this technical note draws from the guides on high-performance computing and timing in the drake manual. You can help! Some of these features are brand new, and others are newly refactored.