R interface to the Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine
Providing access to UC Berkeley's Natural History Data
This package provides a R wrapper for the newly available ecoinformatics engine from UC Berkeley. The API is very new and currently provides access to two types of data.
- Georeferenced data from the Wieslander project
- Data on > 2 million georeferenced Berkley museum specimens.
Installing the package
A stable version can be installed from the central CRAN repository
install.packages("ecoengine", dependencies = TRUE)Install the package with devtools to obtain the latest development version.
# If you don't already have the devtools package installed, run
# install.packages("devtools")
# unlike most packages, devtools requires additional non-R dependencies depending on your OS.
# See → https://github.com/karthik/dlab-advanced-r/blob/master/installation.md#installation
library(devtools)
install_github('ropensci/ecoengine')Documentation
A quick start guide is available both as markdown and a nicely formatted PDF or you can go through a set of slides from a recent talk.
Citation
To cite package ‘ecoengine’ in publications use:
Karthik Ram (2014). ecoengine: Programmatic interface to the API
serving UC Berkeley's Natural History Data. R package version 1.9.
https://github.com/ropensci/ecoengine
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
@Manual{,
title = {ecoengine: Programmatic interface to the API serving UC Berkeley's Natural History
Data},
author = {Karthik Ram},
year = {2014},
note = {R package version 1.9},
url = {https://github.com/ropensci/ecoengine},
}Resources
- Ecoengine API documentation
- Berkeley Natural History Museums
- Guide to using the ecoengine (slides)
- How to make large requests to the ecoengine
Bug reports, feature requests and suggestions (especially as pull requests) are most welcome.
This package is part of a richer suite called SPOCC Species Occurrence Data, along with several other packages, that provide access to occurrence records from multiple databases. We recommend using SPOCC as the primary R interface to ecoengine unless your needs are limited to this single source.