It can be a pain in the ass to get taxonomic names. For example, I sometimes need to get all the Class names for a set of species. This is a relatively easy problem using the ITIS API (example below). The much harder problem is getting all the taxono...
Blog Archives
Exploring phylogenetic tree balance metrics
I need to simulate balanced and unbalanced phylogenetic trees for some research I am doing. In order to do this, I do rejection sampling: simulate a tree -> measure tree shape -> reject if not balanced or unbalanced enough. But what is enough? We ne...
GBIF biodiversity data from R – more functions
We have been working on an R package to get GBIF data from R, with the stable version available through CRAN here, and the development version available on GitHub here. We had a Google Summer of code stuent work on the package this summer - you can se...
Vertnet – getting vertebrate museum record data and a quick map
We (rOpenSci) started a repo to wrap the API for VertNet, an open access online database of vertebrate specimen records across many collection holders. Find the open source code here - please contribute if you are so inclined. We had a great Google Su...
Getting data from figures in published papers
The problem: There are a lot of figures in published papers in the scholarly literature, like the below, from (Attwood et. al. 2012)): At some point, a scientist wants to ask a question for which they can synthesize the knowledge on that question b...
Scholarly metadata from R
Metadata! Metadata is very cool. It's super hot right now - everybody is talking about it. Okay, maybe not everyone, but it's an important part of archiving scholarly work. We are working on a repo on GitHub rmetadata to be a one stop shop for quer...
Getting data on your government
I created an R package a while back to interact with some APIs that serve up data on what our elected represenatives are up to, including the New York Times Congress API, and the Sunlight Labs API. What kinds of things can you do with govdat? Here ...
Getting ecology and evolution journal titles from R
So I want to mine some #altmetrics data for some research I'm thinking about doing. The steps would be: Get journal titles for ecology and evolution journals. Get DOI's for all papers in all the above journal titles. Get altmetrics data on each DO...
Making matrices with zeros and ones
So I was trying to figure out a fast way to make matrices with randomly allocated 0 or 1 in each cell of the matrix. I reached out on Twitter, and got many responses (thanks tweeps!). Here is the solution I came up with. See if you can tell why it...
ggplot2 maps with insets
Here's a quick demo of creating a map with an inset within it using ggplot. The inset is achieved using the gridExtra package. Install libraries, set directory, read file setwd("/Users/ScottMac/Dropbox/CANPOLIN_networks_ms/data") # change ...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
