I recently attended ScienceOnline Climate, a conference in Washington, D.C. at AAAS. You may have heard of the ScienceOnline annual meeting in North Carolina - this was one of their topical meetings focused on Climate Change. I moderated a session on working with data from the web in R, focusing on climate data. Search Twitter for #scioClimate for tweets from the conference, and #sciordata for tweets from the session I ran.

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.

I’ve recently released the new package ccafs, which provides accessto data from Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security(CCAFS; http://ccafs-climate.org/) General Circulation Models (GCM) data.GCM’s are a particular type of climate model, used for weather forecasting,and climate change forecasting - read more athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model.

Happy World Ocean Day! World Ocean Day is a day of celebration and action to protect our shared ocean. While I already appreciate the importance of protecting sensitive ecosystems, including the ocean¹, I found the idea of World Ocean Day especially touching. On World Ocean Day, people around our blue planet celebrate and honor our one shared ocean, that connects us all.

An anaerobic digester at BGI. Biofuels Research Shows the Utility of Container Publishing One of the most promising areas in biofuel development is biogas, which has huge potential as a renewable and clean source of energy.

A recent video on the PBS Ideas Channel posited that the discovery of climate change is humanities greatest scientific achievement. It took synthesizing generations of data from thousands of scientists, hundreds of thousands (if not more) of hours of computer time to run models at institutions all over the world. But how can the individual researcher get their hands of some this data?

At an event hosted by the United Nations library, we announced the Open Climate Campaign is using ShareYourPaper to help climate scientists unlock their papers and accelerate progress on climate change. ShareYourPaper leverages self-archiving rights to make the content of papers freely available.

Academic research enjoys a high level of trust among the society in Germany, not least because of its autonomy that is granted by the constitution. At the same time, the public expects research to leave its “ivory tower” and take on a more active role in addressing complex societal challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change.

PAG30 flyer After 2 cancellations due to the pandemic, the Plant and Animal Genomes conference returned to its in-person format in January with its 30th edition. A number of the talks focused on the effects of climate change either on biodiversity or crop development.

Understanding and managing forests is crucial to understanding and potentially mitigating the effects of climate change, invasive species, and shifting land use on natural systems and human society. However, collecting data on individual trees in the field is expensive and time consuming, which limits the scales at which this crucial data is collected.