Jun 8, 2015

Software

• A new package (version 0.1.0) lawn is on CRAN. lawn is an R client for turf.js for geospatial analysis. The package revolves around using GeoJSON data. Functions are included for creating GeoJSON data objects, measuring aspects of GeoJSON, and combining, transforming, and creating random GeoJSON data objects. See the vignette for an introduction to the package. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (1.3-0) of neotoma is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
• A new version (0.8.4) of rgbif is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
• A new version (2.0.3) of RNeXML is on CRAN. See NEWS for changes.
• A new version (0.5.10) of aRxiv is on CRAN.
• A new version (1.2.8) of rglobi is on CRAN.

Community

• We had our 4th community call on 2015-05-27, with David Winter talking about rentrez, and Carl Boettiger talking about Rocker. Watch the vieo on Vimeo. Notes for the call on the etherpad include answers from David and Carl to many questions from the audience.
• We have our 5th community call coming up on 2015-07-08, in which David Robinson will talk about broom, and Rich FitzJohn will talk about something cool. More info.
• If you have any ideas for upcoming community calls, get back to us in the issues of the community calls repo.

Use cases, questions, and answers

• The draft Fishbase API we’re working on is being used in a real project! Find it in the scrapeSpeciesFromFishbase() function in ehgoodenough/fishy repo.
• CompadreDB - a database of Plant Matrices for population biology - uses taxize to check taxonomic names in their database. See specifically COMADRE_Check_Taxonomy.R.
• Francois Michonneau uses taxize to make a poster for a conference. Repo here.