Emerging viruses might be on everyone’s mind right now, but as an epidemiologist and disease ecologist I’ve always been interested in how and why pathogens move from animal hosts to humans.The current pandemic of the disease we call COVID-19 is caused by Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a virus that has emerged from wildlife like SARS coronavirus and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus

I’m starting to tackle a few hard packages (spplit and spenv) having to do with integrating disparate data sources. I’ll talk here about spplit. I haven’t worked on spplit in a few years; I thought I’d make another attempt with “fresh” eyes. There are many use cases I can imagine for spplit; I’ll highlight a few.

Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools.

Thanks to the second post of the series where we obtained data fromeBird we knowwhat birds were observed in the county of Constance. Now, not allspecies’ names mean a lot to me, and even if they did, there are a lotof them.

taxize was seven years old this last Saturday!What is taxize? taxize is designed around making working with taxonomic names easier - abstracting away the details of what each of 20 or so taxonomic data sources require for a given use case.

What is Taxonomy? Taxonomy in its most general sense is the practice and science of classification. It can refer to many things. You may have heard or used the word taxonomy used to indicate any sort of classification of things, whether it be companies or widgets. Here, we’re talking about biological taxonomy, the science of defining and naming groups of biological organisms.

We just released v0.3 of taxize. For details on the update, see the release notes.Some new features New function iplant_resolve() to do name resolution using the iPlant name resolution service.

We just released a new version of taxize - version 0.2.0. This release contains a number of new features, and bug fixes. Here is a run down of some of the changes:First, install and load taxize install.packages("rgbif")library(taxize)New things New functions: class2tree Sometimes you just want to have a visual of the taxonomic relationships among taxa.

Data on more than 10,000 species of ants recorded worldwide are available through from California Academy of Sciences’ AntWeb, a repository that boasts a wealth of natural history data, digital images, and specimen records on ant species from a large community of museum curators.

Natural history museums have long been valuable repositories of data on species diversity. These data have been critical for fostering and shaping the development of fields such as biogeography and systematics.