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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!...
rgbif was seven years old yesterday! 🔗 What is rgbif? rgbif gives you access to data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) via their API. A samping of use cases covered in rgbif: Search for datasets Get metrics on usage of datasets Get metadata about organizations providing data to GBIF Search taxonomic names Get quick taxonomic name suggestions Search occurrences by taxonomic name/country/collector/etc. Download occurrences by taxonomic name/country/collector/etc....
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 week version 2.0 of the mongolite package has been released to CRAN. Major new features in this release include support for MongoDB 4.0, GridFS, running database commands, and connection pooling. Mongolite is primarily an easy-to-use client to get data in and out of MongoDB. However it supports increasingly many advanced features like aggregation, indexing, map-reduce, streaming, encryption, and enterprise authentication. The mongolite user manual provides a great introduction with details and worked examples....
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....
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