The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a warehouse of species occurrence data - collecting data from a lot of different sources. Our package rgbif allows you to interact with GBIF from R. We interact with GBIF via their Application Programming Interface, or API. Our last version on CRAN (v0.3) interacted with the older version of their API - this version interacts with the new version of their API. However, we also retained functions that interact with the old API.

We are building a taxonomic toolbelt for R called taxize - which gives you programmatic access to many sources of taxonomic data on the web. We just pushed a new version to CRAN (v0.1.5) with a lot of changes (see here for a rundown). Here are a few highlights of the changes. Note: the windows binary may not be available yet… Install and load taxize install.packages("taxize") library(taxize) Taxonomic identifiers Each taxonomic service has their own unique ID for a taxon.

We have previously written about creating interactive maps on the web from R, with the interactive maps on Github. See here, here, here, and here. A different approach is to use CartoDB, a freemium service with sql interface to your data tables that provides a map to visualize data in those tables. They released an R interace to their sql API on Github here - which we can use to make an interactive map from R.

Previously on this blog we have discussed making geojson maps and uploading to Github for interactive visualization with USGS BISON data, and with GBIF data, and on my own personal blog. This is done using a file format called geojson, a file format based on JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in which you can specify geographic data along with any other metadata. In two the previous posts about geojson, I described how you could get data from the USGS BISON API using our rbison package, and from the GBIF API using the rgbif package, then make a geojson file, and send to Github.

Open access week is here! We love open access, and think it’s extremely important to publish in open access journals. One of the many benefits of open access literature is that we likely can use the text of articles in OA journals for many things, including text-mining. What’s even more awesome is some OA publishers provide API (application programming interface) access to their full text articles. Public Library of Science (PLOS) is one of these.