The team at rOpenSci and I have been working on a wrapper for the USA National Phenology Network API. The following is a demo of some of the current possibilities. We will have more functions down the road. Get the publicly available code, and contribute, at Github here. If you try this out look at the Description file for the required R packages to run rnpn. Let us know at Github (here) or at our website http://ropensci.org/, or in the comments below, or on twitter (@rOpenSci), what use cases you would like to see with the rnpn package.
Method and demo of each:
Get observations for species by day
From the documentation:
This function will return a list of species, containing all the dates which observations were made about the species, and a count of the number of such observations made on that date.
Note, the data below is truncated for blogging brevity…
# Searched for any individuals at stations 507 and 523
> getindsatstations(c(507, 523))
individual_id individual_name species_id kingdom
1 1200 dogwood 12 Plantae
2 1197 purple lilac 36 Plantae
3 1193 white t 38 Plantae
4 3569 forsythia-1 73 Plantae
5 1206 jack 150 Plantae
6 1199 trout lily 161 Plantae
7 1198 dandy 189 Plantae
8 1192 red t 192 Plantae
9 1710 common lilac 36 Plantae
10 1711 common lilac 2 36 Plantae
11 1712 dandelion 189 Plantae
Get individuals of species at stations
From the documentation: “This function will return a list of all the individuals, which are members of a species, among any number of stations.”
Search for individuals of species 35 at stations 60 and 259 in year 2009
> getindspatstations(35, c(60, 259), 2009)
individual_id individual_name number_observations
1 1715 west 5
2 1716 east 5
Get observation associated with particular observation
From the documentation: “This function will return the comment associated with a particular observation.”
# The observation for observation number 1938
> getobscomm(1938)
$observation_comment
[1] "some lower branches are bare"