emielvanloon / pullbbs

An R package for downloading species abundance data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey ftp server.

About pullBBS

pullBBS is a R package designed to download and reorganize data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (here after referred to as BBS). Data stored on the ftp server is saved in a series of tables designed to be accessed within a relational database environment. The pullBBS package will automatically query this data once downloaded, appending the tables containing species observations, survey dates and locations, and weather data into a single table. pullBBS can then further reorganize this data table into a long format which allows it to be easily used used within species distribution modelling functions within R.

*Note: pullBBS is not officially supported by the North American Breeding Bird Survey, therefore the North American Breeding Bird Survey cannot be held responsible for any mistakes in the package or resulting data which is downloaded using this package.

Installation and use

By executing the following code in R, you can install pullBBS using the devtools package. Once installed, you can view the Example_usage vignette to see example workflows.

## Install devtools package
install.packages('devtools')
require(devtools)

## Install and load pullBBS package
install_github(repo = 'RTbecard/pullBBS',build_vignettes=F,force = T)
require(pullBBS)

## Load example
vignette(package = 'pullBBS',topic = 'Example_usage')

To do list

A short list of features we're currently working on implementing into the package:

• Function to quickly calculate species richness metrics for pulled data (Simpsons and Chao indices).