RT Journal Article
T1 rAvis: an R-package for downloading information stored in proyecto AVIS, a citizen science bird project
A1 Varela, Sara
A1 González Hernández, Javier
A1 Casabella, Eduardo
A1 Barrientos Yuste, Rafael
AB Citizen science projects store an enormous amount of information about species distribution, diversity and characteristics. Researchers are now beginning to make use of this rich collection of data. However, access to these databases is not always straightforward. Apart from the largest and international projects, citizen science repositories often lack specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to connect them to the scientific environments. Thus, it is necessary to develop simple routines to allow researchers to take advantage of the information collected by smaller citizen science projects, for instance, programming specific packages to connect them to popular scientific environments (like R). Here, we present rAvis, an R-package to connect R-users with Proyecto AVIS (http://proyectoavis.com), a Spanish citizen science project with more than 82,000 bird observation records. We develop several functions to explore the database, to plot the geographic distribution of the species occurrences, and to generate personal queries to the database about species occurrences (number of individuals, distribution, etc.) and birdwatcher observations (number of species recorded by each collaborator, UTMs visited, etc.). This new R-package will allow scientists to access this database and to exploit the information generated by Spanish birdwatchers over the last 40 years.
PB Public Library of Science
YR 2014
FD 2014-03
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/131141
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/131141
LA eng
NO Varela S, González-Hernández J, Casabella E, Barrientos R (2014) rAvis: An R-Package for Downloading Information Stored in Proyecto AVIS, a Citizen Science Bird Project. PLoS ONE 9(3): e91650. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0091650
NO Funding: Sara Varela and Rafael Barrientos have postdoctoral grants. SV is funded by the European Science Foundation and Czech Republic, from the Education for Competitiveness Operational Programme (ECOP) project “Support of establishment, development and mobility of quality research teams at the Charles University” (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0022). RB received financial assistance from Juan de la Cierva program from the Spanish Ministry of Competitiveness.
NO European Science Foundation
NO Charles University
NO Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 18 mar 2026