galah is an R interface to biodiversity data hosted by the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and
those members of the GBIF node network that maintain their own APIs
(i.e. the ‘living atlases’). These
organisations collate and store observations of individual life forms,
using the ‘Darwin Core’ data standard. galah
was built and is maintained by the Science & Decision Support
Team at the Atlas of Living
Australia (ALA).
galah enables users to locate and download species occurrence records
(observations, specimens, eDNA records, etc.), taxonomic information, or
associated media such as images or sounds, and to restrict their queries
to particular taxa or locations. Users can specify which columns are
returned by a query, or restrict their results to occurrences that meet
particular data-quality criteria. All functions return a tibble as
their standard format.
The package is named for the bird of the same name (Eolophus roseicapilla), a widely-distributed endemic Australian species. The logo was designed by Ian Brennan.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please contact us.
- The quick start guide provides an introduction to the package functions.
- For an outline of the package structure, and a list of all the
available functions, run
?galahor view the reference page.
Install from CRAN:
install.packages("galah")Install the development version from GitHub:
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("AtlasOfLivingAustralia/galah-R")galah depends on sf for location-based searches. To install galah
you will need to make sure your system meets the sf system
requirements, as specified
here.
To generate a citation for the package version you are using, you can run
citation(package = "galah")If you’re using occurrence data downloaded through galah in a
publication, please generate a DOI and cite it. To request a DOI for a
download of occurrence record, set mint_doi = TRUE in a call to
atlas_occurrences(). To generate a citation for the downloaded
occurrence records, pass the tibble generated to atlas_citation().
# Download occurrence records with a DOI
occ <- atlas_occurrences(..., mint_doi = TRUE)
# See DOI
attr(occ, "doi")
# Generate citation
atlas_citation(occ)