This is a great post about a great package. Unlike some other broad vertebrate databases, VertNet has good QAQC. It’s great being able to access it directly in R where the data manipulation, analysis, and even plotting will occur. Thank you to the ROpenSci team for development of the rvertnet package and Vijay Barve for the clear, simple tutorial.
As part of my Google Summer of Code, I am also working on another package for R called rvertnet. This package is a wrapper in R for VertNet websites. Vertnet is a vertebrate distributed database network consisting of FishNet2, MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS. Out of that currently Fishnet, HerpNET and ORNIS have their v2 portals serving data. rvertnet has functions now to access this data and import them into R data frames.
Some of my lab mates faced a difficulty in downloading data for Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma spp. ) due to large number of records (220k+) on ORNIS, so decided to try using rvertnet package which was still in development that time. The package really helpe and got the results quickly. So while ecploring that data I came up with this case study.
So here to get data for Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) which is distributed in…
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Daniel J. Hocking 