All posts (Page 120 of 122)
We have a number of packages for getting species occurrence data: rgbif and rbison. The power of R is that you can pull down this occurrence data, manipulate the data, do some analyses, and visualize the data - all in one open source framework.
However, when dealing with occurrence data on maps, it is often useful to be able to interact with the visualization. Github, a code hosting and collaboration site, now renders a particular type of map file format as an interactive map. This file format is called .geojson. Here is an example of an interactive map hosted on Github, embedded here:
R has a reputation of not playing nice on the web. At rOpenSci, we write R pacakages to bring data from around the web into R on your local machine - so we mostly don’t do any dev for the web. However, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) recenty held an app competition - it was a good opportunity to play with R on the web. We won best overall app as described in an earlier post on this blog. Check out our app TaxaViewer at https://ropensci.shinyapps.io/taxaviewer/. Last week we presented the app to the USGS - a video of the presentation will be coming soon. A screenshot:...
At rOpenSci’s virtual HQ we’re busy planning out several exciting projects for the coming year thanks to the generous 180k grant from Sloan. In the interest of maintaining transparency with our community here are additional details of what we hope to accomplish and how we’ll measure our successes. We have also posted a full copy of our proposal over at figshare.
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Objectives for the year
a) Focus on identifying shortcomings, strengthening our core products, and working to link existing tools through interoperable data structures and visualization routines. To facilitate this process, we will convene two hackathons, one with the core development team and advisors and a second with a wider group of rOpenSci collaborators.
...Today we are pleased to announce that rOpenSci has been awarded a generous 180K grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. This funding will allow us to develop a whole new suite of tools and provide scientists with general purpose toolkits to access various kinds of scientific data. We will also be traveling a whole bunch this year and running workshops at several conferences and universities. If you’d like us to speak to your research group, please get in touch. We’ll be at several events over the coming months including The Ecological Society of America annual meeting, The Open knowledge conference, Science Online Climate, American Geophysical Union and several others. Stay tuned for announcements on Twitter, our blog (rss) and new mailing list....
The USGS recently released a way to search for and get species occurrence records for the USA. The service is called BISON (Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation). The service has a web interface for human interaction in a browser, and two APIs (application programming interface) to allow machines to interact with their database. One of the APIs allows you to search and retrieve data, and the other gives back maps as either a heatmap or a species occurrence map. The latter is more appropriate for working in a browser, so I’ll leave that to the web app folks....
