Download historical frequencies of bird observations from eBird

NOTE: Currently disabled.

Usage

ebirdfreq(
  loctype,
  loc,
  startyear = 1900,
  endyear = format(Sys.Date(), "%Y"),
  startmonth = 1,
  endmonth = 12,
  long = TRUE,
  ...
)

Arguments

loctype: String with location type. Either "states", "counties", or "hotspots".
loc: String with location identifier. If querying states or provinces, the two letter country code followed by the two letter state code and separated by "-" (e.g. "US-NY"). If querying counties, is as in states/provinces, but appending county identifier after a dash. For counties in the US, the county codes is a 3-digit number specific to each state (e.g. Bronx County: "US-NY-005"). For counties in Canada, county codes are two-letter identifiers (e.g. Metro Vancouver: "CA-BC-GV"). If querying hotspots then the unique identifier is a 6-digit number prepended with an "L" (e.g. "L196159"). All these codes can be found by looking at the URL in each respective location/hotspot webpage (which are accessible through the "Explore Data" tab).
startyear: Starting year for query. Defaults to 1900.
endyear: Ending year for query. Defaults to current year specified by Sys.Date().
startmonth: Starting month for query as an integer (1-12). Defaults to January.
endmonth: Ending month for query as an integer (1-12). Defaults to December.
long: Logical, Should output be in long format? Defaults to TRUE. If FALSE then output will be in wide format.
...: Curl options passed on to GET

Value

This function currently returns an error, but also provides the constructed url to manually obtain the data for the location and dates requested through your browser.

A data frame containing the collected information. If in long format:

"monthQt": month and week (eBird data divides each month by four weeks)

"comName": species common name

"frequency": proportion of times the species was seen in a specified week

"sampleSize" number of complete eBird checklists submitted for specified given week @return If in wide format, then first column is the species list and all other columns are of individual weeks (four in each month). First row contains the number of complete checklists for each week.

Details

This function was the only rebird function to not use the API and formulated a url-based query instead. Now you need to be logged into eBird to download the frequency data, but we can't authenticate through R, so this function does not work. This functionality is likely to be added to the API in the future, so we are keeping the function in the meantime, but it throws an informative error, and provides the constructed url to obtain the frequency data manually through your browser.

References

http://ebird.org/

Author

Andy Teucher andy.teucher@gmail.com, Sebastian Pardo sebpardo@gmail.com

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
ebirdfreq("states", "US-NY", 2014, 2014, 1, 12)
ebirdfreq("counties", "CA-BC-GV", 1900, 2015, 1, 3)
ebirdfreq("hotspots", "L196159", long=FALSE)
} # }