The Open Tree of Life project aims to synthesize our combined knowledge of how organisms relate to each other, and make the results available to anyone who wants to use them. At present, the project contains data from more than 4,000 published phylogenies, which combine with other data sources to make a tree that covers 2.5 million species.

In September, the Open Tree of Life team are holding a hackathon to develop tools that use the project’s web services to extract, annotate and add data. We are excited to say that Francois Michonneau and I will be attending the hackathon, where they plan to work with Joseph W. Brown on an R package that allows users to interact with the Open Tree data.

• conference

In the last 12 months we traveled all over the world delivering talks and hands on workshops at various conferences and universities. This was a great opportunity for us to raise awareness for the project and get more of you involved as contributors and collaborators. As we scale the project to the next level, we need your help in spreading the message.

Today we would like to officially announce the rOpenSci Ambassadors program. To facilitate more discussion about rOpenSci tools and projects, we like to support our community members in running small workshops (perhaps a lunch time event), talks (lightning or longer talk at the next conference you attend), hands on tutorials (for your grad department, seminar), or similar event.

• community

UPDATE: Use the new discussion forum at https://discuss.ropensci.org/

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Community

Community is at the heart of rOpenSci. We couldn’t have accomplished most of our work without help from various contributors and users.

Most of our discussions with the broader community over the past year have been through twitter or one-on-one conversations. However, we would like to foster more open ended and deeper discussions with our community. To this end, we are resurrecting our public Google group list. We encourage you to sign up and post ideas for packages, solicit feedback on new ideas, and most importantly find other collaborators who share your domain interests. We also plan to use the list to solicit feedback on some of the bigger rOpenSci projects early on in the development phase allowing our community to shape future direction and also collaborate where appropriate.

• community

We’re delighted to be sponsoring the upcoming Open Science Codefest in Santa Barbara, California, alongside RENCI, NCEAS, NSF, DataONE, and Mozilla Science Lab. The Open Science Codefest’s goal is to gather researchers from across ecology, biodiversity science, and other earth and environmental sciences with programmer types to collaborate on coding projects. The ideas for the event so far include not just coding projects with the end result being software, but conversations on particular topics that may or my not lead to code being written....

• conference

We just released v0.2 of rnoaa. For details on the update, see the release notes. What follows are some notes on the more important changes.

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Updating to v0.2

Install rnoaa from CRAN

install.packages("rnoaa")

or Github

devtools::install_github("ropensci/rnoaa")

Then load rnoaa

library("rnoaa")

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UI changes

We changed almost all function names to have a more intuitive programmatic user interface (or UI).

• We changed all noaa*() functions to ncdc*() - these work only with NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data, so the ncdc name makes sense.
• noaa_seaice() changed to seaice(), which works with NOAA sea ice data.
• noaa_swdi() changed to swdi(), which works with data from the Severe Weather Data Inventory.

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Two new data sources

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ERDDAP

We added new functions to interact with NOAA ERDDAP data: erddap_info(), erddap_data(), and erddap_search(). As a quick example, let’s search for data, get a dataset identifier, then get information on that dataset, then get the data.

• API