rOpenSci HQ The rOpenSci team, together with ten expert community members, put together a post: When Field or Lab Work is not an Option - Leveraging Open Data Resources for Remote Research. We highlighted examples of how specific collections of packages are being used right now in fields as varied as archaeology and climate science and compiled a table of > 100 rOpenSci packages for access to open data.

One of the first things I took on when I started at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology was creating the auk R package for accessing eBird data. The entire eBird dataset can be downloaded as a massive text file, called the eBird Basic Dataset (EBD), and auk pulls out manageable chunks of the dataset based on various spatial, temporal, or taxonomic filters.

Thanks to the second post of the series where we obtained data fromeBird we knowwhat birds were observed in the county of Constance. Now, not allspecies’ names mean a lot to me, and even if they did, there are a lotof them.

Thanks to the first post of theseries we knowwhere to observe birds near Radolfzell’s Max Planck Institute forOrnithology, so we could go and do that! Or we can stay behind ourlaptops and take advantage of eBird, afantastic bird sightings aggregator!