Aug 3, 2015

Software

• A new package (version 0.4.1) rotl is on CRAN. See the vignette for an introduction to the package. Repository on GitHub. This package is maintained by Francois Michonneau, Joseph Brown, and David Winter, and is Interface to Open Tree of Life API -

a tree of life created by synthesizing published phylogenetic trees along with taxonomic data.

• A new version (0.8.8) of rgbif is on CRAN. This was a fairly minor version bump with bug fixes and additional tests. See the release notes for changes.
• A new version (0.4) of RCryptsy is on CRAN. Some changes listed in the NEWS.

Community

We’ve had some interesting questions on our discussion forum recently:

• Data only packages https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/data-only-packages/203
• Including metadata with data.frame’s https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/embed-metadata-in-r-objects/221
• Docker and general scientific computing setups https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/docker-and-general-scientific-computing-set-ups/217

In addition, we recently added two new features to our discussion forum: tags and polls.

Use cases

Papers using our R packages:

• Sagouis et al. have a paper in Ecography titled Non-native species modify the isotopic structure of freshwater fish communities across the globe that uses and cites our rfishbase package.
• Hampton et al. have a paper in Ecosphere titled The Tao of open science for ecology that uses and cites our rentrez package.