The online survey system Qualtrics can be a great way to collect data from research participants, customers, and stakeholders. I use it frequently to conduct research studies with participants or just to poll students and collaborators.

These days web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are everywhere (scientific data sources, your system for Customer relationship management, cat facts API…). Do you need to write some R code wrapping a web resource such as an API? Packaging it up might be useful to you or your team for the same reason as any code.

terrainr version 0.4.0 is now on CRAN! This version is a relatively minor updatethat shouldn’t impact most workflows, but makes some changes to improve thelogic and consistency of the package. The rest of this post runs through thechanges you can expect if you update.packages any time soon!What’s a terrainr? terrainr is an R package for theretrieval and visualization of spatial data.

The Ecology Hackathon Almost one year ago now, ecologists filled a room for the “Ecology Hackathon: Developing R Packages for Accessing, Synthesizing and Analyzing Ecological Data” that was co-organised by rOpenSci Fellow, Nick Golding and Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This hackathon was part of the “Ecology Across Borders” Joint Annual Meeting 2017 of BES, GfÖ, NecoV, and EEF in Ghent.