BirdLife International data

[davharris]

BirdLife International has a lot of useful data on bird habitats, traits, and threats, ranges, conservation strategies, etc. I can get a lot of the data with this set of commands, but it's not s robust as I'd like. In particular, different species can have different tables available, and it would be nice to handle that gracefully.

Also, I don't currently have a good way to find species' numeric IDs, so I don't have a good way to search by name.

Does this seem like something that taxize would be interested in implementing? If so, I can dig into it some more and try to set up a pull request.

library(XML)
library(RCurl)
id = "22705990"
url = paste0(
  "http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/species/factsheet/", 
  id, 
  "/additional"
)
readHTMLTable(url)

[davharris]

BTW, a lot of the same information is available on the IUCN website, but the BirdLife version seems more structured. The two websites seem to share numeric species codes as well, which should make BirdLife more searchable.

[sckott]

hey @davharris Thanks for this.

we're in the process of moving over functionality from taxize that does not deal specifically with names/etc. to different packages. Most of the trait related stuff we're moving to a new package traits here https://github.com/ropensci/traits

Any trait functionality would be cool there. But if there is name functionality from BirdLife, a PR would be most welcome.

Thanks for the note about the IUCN. I think @EDiLD has worked with that data, any thoughts Ed?

[davharris]

Thanks @sckott!

[eduardszoecs]

Don't know if we can get that much taxonomic information out of birdlife.org. I only saw the family and order names. But feel free to add this functionality.

The iucn-functionality in taxize is just a plus (and does fit into the package, as it deals only partly with taxonomy). Same would be for the additional data from birdlife.

[sckott]

@davharris thoughts? PR for the taxonomic data? if youre up for it, let us know if you have any questions

[davharris]

I'll try to prototype something for the traits package tomorrow morning.

Thanks,

Dave

On Sep 18, 2014, at 8:07 PM, Scott Chamberlain notifications@github.com wrote:

@davharris thoughts? PR for the taxonomic data? if youre up for it, let us know if you have any questions

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[sckott]

cool, thanks

[davharris]

A brittle, slightly dirty, non-best-practices prototype is now up on my fork of the traits package: https://github.com/davharris/traits/commit/cfa8c8200b6397c0868b8f7c4b29dd9c5d362768

[sckott]

@davharris thanks, I'll take a look soon

[sckott]

@davharris looks good to me, want to send a PR to traits master? or I can wrap your code up with docs, etc.