Thanks to the second post of the series where we obtained data from eBird we know what birds were observed in the county of Constance. Now, not all species’ names mean a lot to me, and even if they did, there are a lot of them. In this post, we shall use rOpenSci’s packages accessing taxonomy and trait data in order to summarize some characteristics of the birds’ population of the county: armed with scientific and common names of birds, we have access to plenty of open data!

In this new post, we’re taking a break from modern birding data in our birder’s series… let’s explore gorgeous drawings from a natural history collection! Armed with rOpenSci’s packages binding powerful C++ libraries and open taxonomy data, how much information can we automatically extract from images? Maybe not much, but we’ll at least have explored image manipulation, optical character recognition (OCR), language detection, taxonomic name resolution with rOpenSci’s packages. Free natural history images and appropriate R tooling!

Thanks to the first post of the series we know where to observe birds near Radolfzell’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, so we could go and do that! Or we can stay behind our laptops and take advantage of eBird, a fantastic bird sightings aggregator! As explained by Matt Strimas-Mackey in his recent blog post, “The eBird database currently contains over 500 million records of bird sightings, spanning every country and over 98% of species, making it an extremely valuable resource for bird research and conservation.

This post is the 1st post of a series showcasing various rOpenSci packages as if Maëlle were a birder trying to make the most of R in general and rOpenSci in particular. Although the series use cases will mostly feature birds, it’ll be the occasion to highlight rOpenSci’s packages that are more widely applicable, so read on no matter what your field is! Moreoever, each post should stand on its own.

eBird is an online tool for recording bird observations. The eBird database currently contains over 500 million records of bird sightings, spanning every country and nearly every bird species, making it an extremely valuable resource for bird research and conservation. These data can be used to map the distribution and abundance of species, and assess how species’ ranges are changing over time. This dataset is available for download as a text file; however, this file is huge (over 180 GB!