WK 22
SPOCC: The Final Frontier of Online Species Occurence Data
Monday, August 11, 2014: 11:30 AM-1:15 PM
Tahoe, Hyatt Regency Hotel
Organizer:
Edmund Hart, National Ecological Observatory Network
Co-organizers:
Karthik Ram, University of California Berkeley;
Carl Boettiger, UC Berkeley; and
Scott Chamberlain, ROpenSci
As ecology moves into the 21st century, we are seeing an increase in the number of online databases that contain information relevant to ecologists. These databases encompass a variety of data such as species occurrence, taxonomic names and phylogenetic trees. However many ecologists will find databases of species occurrence data of particular interest. Some of the largest sources of high quality online occurrence data that can be accessed over the web are the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the USGS run Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON), and the citizen science project iNaturalist among others. The ROpenSci project (http://www.ropensci.org) has created a package for the R programming language called SPecies OCCurence (SPOCC) that can search and synthesizes data from these three major online sources. Ecologists can easily download search results into the R working environment and integrate online data with other data sources such as environmental variables, or their own occurrence data. In this workshop we will teach ecologists how to search for species occurrence data using the SPOCC package, and then discuss a variety of use cases. These will include creating maps of species occurrence, combining SPOCC data with other spatial information, and integrating search results with local data sources. Attendees will leave the workshop with the skills to access high quality species occurrence data from the web with the ROpenSci package SPOCC and ideas about how they could integrate online ecological data with their current analyses.
