Open-data resources

Last updated: 2021/10/18 (yyyy/mm/dd)

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Purpose

Growing list of interesting open-data resources maintained by the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab at the University of Michigan. The list has a focus on data sources that can be accessed directly from an R session by providing an API. However, also other freely accessible databases are included.

Contribute to the list

If you have any comments, suggestions, revisions, or improvements please open an Issue or submit a Pull request. If you do not have an GitHub account (and do not want to create one), you can also contact the maintainer directly using e-mail. We highly appreciate any input and feedback. Please always write one sentence per line to make tracking changes easier.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Resources

Species data

• rfishbase: Access to Fishbase and SeaLifeBase, global species databases of fish species and marine life.

• worrms: Access to World Register of Marine Species.

• rfisheries: Access to Open Fisheries providing global fishery data.

• LTER: North Temperate Lakes LTER: Fish Lengths and Weights 1981 - current

Biodiversity

• Ocean+ Liberay: Ocean+ Library connects to the latest data and online resources on ocean biodiversity.

• UN global marine biodiversity: United Nations Environmental Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre’s map of global marine biodiversity

• rvertnet: Access to VertNet that makes biodiversity data free and available on the web.

(Marine) Environmental data

• dataaimsr: Access to environmental parameters along the tropical coast of Australia provided by the Australian Institute of Marine Science:

• marmap: Bathymetric and topographic data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans and other sources.

• mregions: Marine regions data from http://www.marineregions.org/, a standard list of marine georeferenced place names and areas.

• rnoaa: Access many NOAA data sources.

• Global surface water explorer: Location and temporal distribution of water surfaces at the global scale.

Satellite data

• getlandsat: Access to Landsat 8 satellite data.

• modis: Access to MODIS imagery from the global online data archives LP DAAC, LAADS and NSIDC.

• sen2r: Access to Sentinel-2 satellite data.

Various

• elevatr: Access elevation data from AWS Open Data Terrain Tiles and the Open Topography Global datasets API for raster digital elevation models.

• rnaturalearth: Access with Natural Earth database providing map datasets.

• ecodata: Collection of ecological datasets for teaching.

• Macroecology datasets: Huge list of databases for macroecology.

• Free GIS data: List with several free GIS data resources

• owidR: Access the Our World in Data database with all kind of different data (including biodiversity).

• geodata: Download geographic data from different sources.