Poland Biodiversity Application

The shiny application allows for an interactive exploration of the biodiversity data for Poland.

Data source: The data is obtained from Global Biodiversity Information Facility

My submission is hosted here: Poland Biodiversity Application

App Structure

app.R app file (UI and server logic live)
constants.R data constants file
data.Rdata loading and manipulation file
www/app_data.rds app clean data
www/poland.csv app raw data
modules/charts_module.R module for chart display
modules/search_module.R module for drop down search that does the map and table filtering

Data

My first step was to explore the data, what is the data structure (variables,size)? The data was huge (20GB) and I prepped to write the data to SQL.I used the R studio great guide on database using R. Exploring the Global Biodiversity website facilitated a deeper understanding of the data. Using this Appsilon guide: https://appsilon.com/fast-data-loading-from-files-to-r/ , I opted to use the Rds function for enhanced performance.The server-side selectize also offers faster performance when loading and selecting data variables.

App UI

Appsilon offers great UI options for developing enterprise shiny applications (https://appsilon.com/shiny-templates-available/). I used the appealing Semantic UI to structure the app layout. You can explore the detailed guide. Fluent UI is also a great UI option worth exploring.

App modules

The search module takes in a variable, filters the data and outputs the filtered data on the data-table and the map.

The chart module is static and displays a sum total of species occurence per month and year.

Using this guide (https://appsilon.com/leaflet-vs-tmap-build-interactive-maps-with-r-shiny/) I was able to leverage leaflet package for interactive mapping.

Performance Testing

The testServer() function makes it possible to test code in server functions and modules. I used the function to validate my module's outputs.

App optimization

The bindCache() function enables the app to automatically retrieve the values saved in the cache instead of having to compute them again.Guide on caching:https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/caching.html