Introduction The availability of large quantities of freely available data is revolutionizing the world of ecological research. Open data maximizes the opportunities to perform comparative analyses and meta-analyses. Such synthesis efforts will increasingly exploit “population data”, which we define here as time series of population abundance.

Are you passionate about statistical methods and software? If so we would love for you to join our team to dig deep into the world of statistical software packages. You’ll develop standards for evaluating and reviewing statistical tools, publish, and work closely with an international team of experts to set up a new software review system.

The grainchanger package provides functionality for data aggregation to a coarser resolution via moving-window or direct methods. Why do we need new methods for data aggregation? As landscape ecologists and macroecologists, we often need to aggregate data in order to harmonise datasets. In doing so, we often lose a lot of information about the spatial structure and environmental heterogeneity of data measured at finer resolution.

We’re delighted to announce that we have received new funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The $678K grant, awarded through the Foundation’s Data & Computational Research program, will be used to expand our efforts in software peer review.

We’ve been following rOpenSci’s work for a long time, and we use several packages on a daily basis for our scientific projects, especially taxize to clean species names, rredlist to extract species IUCN statuses or [treeio](many probs with this post) to work with phylogenetic trees.rOpensci is a perfect incarnation of a vibrant and diverse community where people learn and develop new ideas, especially regarding scientific packages.We’ve also

Introduction ramlegacy is a new R package to download, cache and read in all the different versions of the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database, a public database containing stock assessment results of commercially exploited marine populations from around the world.

We strive for high quality in our suite of packages, in practice via a system of software peer review, and via packaging guidelines that keep growing. There is therefore a risk of increasing the workload of package authors, who already have a lot on their plate. To avoid that, when explaining how to do things in our dev guide, we recommend existing automated tools to authors.

As announced in our recent post about updates to our Software Peer Review system, all our package development, review and maintenance is available as an online book. Our goal is to update it approximately quarterly so it’s already time to present its second official version!

Introduction Open Trade Statistics (OTS) was created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval.

rOpenSci is one of the first organizations in the R community I ever interacted with, when I participated in the 2016 rOpenSci unconf. I have since reviewed several rOpenSci packages and been so happy to be connected to this community, but I have never submitted or maintained a package myself. All that changed when I heard the call for a new maintainer for the qualtRics package. “IT’S GO TIME,” I thought.