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trashbirdecology / bbsAssistant

An R package for downloading and handling data and information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey.
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Confusing API for `subset_speciesList` #66

Closed ethanwhite closed 4 years ago

ethanwhite commented 4 years ago

This is recommendation based on my experience while reviewing this package for JOSS (https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/1768).

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I was confused by the API for subset_speciesList. My reading of the vignette was that passing aou.ind would subset the data to only the provided AOU. This matched my intuition for how a function named subset_speciesList would work. However, as documented in the function documentation the behavior is actually the opposite, with the list of species provided being removed and all other species kept.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would consider either renaming this function to something like remove_species or changing the argument names to something like drop_species. This would make the i

Describe alternatives you've considered

Clarifying the vignette to make the behavior clearer would be another option, but I think intuitive naming would go a long way to preventing user confusion.

trashbirdecology commented 4 years ago

Agreed. Will update to include remove_spp.. Not sure what I was thinking..

trashbirdecology commented 4 years ago

@ethanwhite I have simplified subsetting by removing functions eluding to this, and rather supply examples of species-level (and other taxonomic level) subsetting in the vignette currently housed in here.

Future development includes more niche species subsetting (e.g., function or argument to remove species with crappy detectability).