Programmatic Interface to the API Serving UC Berkeley's Natural History Data

The ecoengine provides access to more than 5 million georeferenced specimen records from the University of California, Berkeley's Natural History Museums.

Linux:
Windows:

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.