Software

New packages

Releases

  • A new version (0.5.4) of spocc is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. This version has a number of bug fixes, and forces newer versions of some dependencies, also which have had fixes in them. Do upgrade! Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (0.2.4) of pangaear is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. This version improves documentation, and changes internal code that fetches data from the website as Pangaea website structure has changed. pg_search() in older versions won’t work now, do upgrade. Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (0.6.4) of rnoaa is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. This version of rnoaa gains a function isd_read to let users read in ISD data in following R sessions (whereas isd() downloads and reads data). All the functions in rnoaa that used to download from NOAA FTP servers into files in your home directory now use rappdirs to determine where to download based on your OS. Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (0.9.5) of rgbif is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. occ_search() gains facetting functionality, and a new function occ_facet() to only do facetting, with no occurrence data; see examples in the docs. A suite of new parameters have been added to occ_search() and occ_data(). Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (0.4.0) of solrium is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. Many minor improvements, including replacing XML with xml2, fixes to solr_group(), and now using tibble for compact data.frame representation rather than custom internal code. Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (0.5.0) of rbison is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (2.1) of hunspell is on CRAN. See NEWS for changes. Repository on GitHub.
  • A new version (1.4.5) of RSelenium is on CRAN. See NEWS for changes. Repository on GitHub.

Package notes

The package spoccutils is now archived on CRAN. It was originally broken out of spocc for two reasons: 1) to allow spocc to focus on only retrieving species occurrence data, and 2) to make it easy to clean and map data from spocc outputs. We learned through time that the R community could use more general purpose tools for cleaning and mapping species occurrence data; that is, tools that aren’t tied to the output of spocc, but any species occurrence data. Check out mapr for mapping species occurrence data with lots of different formats (base plots, ggplot, ggmap, leaflet, etc.) and scrubr for cleaning species occurrence data.



Onboarding

We accept community contributed packages via our onboarding system - a software review system, sorta like scholarly paper review, but way better. We’ll highlight new packages here that have come through this system. A huge thanks to our reviewers, who do a lot of work reviewing (see the blog post on our review system), and the authors of the packages!

The following packages recently went through our onboarding process and have been approved:

The following was recently submitted to our onboarding process and is undergoing review:



Use cases

One recent book review cites rOpenSci:

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is holding a competition for apps that use GBIF data. It’s called the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. We make the most widely used client for acquiring GBIF data: rgbif. rgbif is used in at least the following entries to the competition:






Keep up with rOpenSci news

There are a number of ways to keep up with what rOpenSci is doing:



Footnotes