Software

A number of packages below were updated simply to fix one or both of two issues: httr v1, recently on CRAN, made some functionality of our packages not work, and CRAN now requires that all non base package functions are explicitly imported (e.g., if setNames() is used in the package, then we import stats::setNames() in the NAMESPACE file). Of course there were other changes too in packages updated below, as noted.

  • A new package (version 0.1.0) spoccutils is on CRAN. spoccutils is a companion to the spocc package. Where spocc focuses on getting you species occurrence data, spoccutils will focus on visualizing and cleaning data, among other things. This separation makes both sets of functionality to be maintained more easily. See the vignette for an introduction to the package. Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (0.3.0) of spocc is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note:
    • Mapping functions all gone, now in spoccutils.
    • occ() gains new parameter has_coords (logical) to only retrieve occurrences with lat/long data, or only without that data.
    • type and rank parameters dropped from occ().
    • New functions as.*() (e.g., as.gbif()) for all data sources, that take an occurrence key and fetch as detailed information as possible on that occurrence.
    • New data source: VertNet.
    • occ2df() now returns more fields.
  • A new version (0.4.2) of rnoaa is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
  • A new patch version (0.4.2) of rentrez is on CRAN. See the news for changes.
  • A new version (0.3.0) of rvertnet is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note: searchbyterm() and bigsearch() now allow some parameters to accept multiple values. In addition, internals of searchbyterm(), spatialsearch(), and vertsearch() reworked to internally do paging for you for bigger result sets.
  • A new version (0.2.0) of rerddap is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note: Added a suite of functions to manage locally cached files.
  • A new version (0.5.0) of rplos is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
  • A new version (0.4.8) of rbison is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
  • A new version (0.5.0) of elastic is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
  • A new version (0.3.0) of gistr is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note: new function gist_save() to help save files locally; gist() now accepts either a full or partial gist URL in addition to a gist ID.
  • A new version (0.8.6) of rgbif is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note: New suite of functions for working with GBIF’s download API, all prefixed with download_ - see ?downloads for help.
  • A new version (0.2) of rebird is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes.
  • A new version (0.2.0) of rbhl is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note: gained many new functions.
  • A new version (0.3.4) of rcrossref is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. Of note: added new function crosscite() to work with the Crossref Citeproc service.
  • A new version (1.3.2) of neotoma is on CRAN. See the news for changes.

Community

  • We had our 5th community call on 2015-07-08, in which David Robinson gave a great talk on broom. More info. The video recording will be up soon.

Use cases

The following is a small sampling of usage examples of our R packages.