predictsr

predictsr fetches the latest version of the open-access PREDICTS database extract from the Natural History Museum Data Portal.

The PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) dataset comprises 4,318,808 measurements, from 35,736 sampling locations in 101 countries and 54,863 species, taken across two releases: one in 2016 and another in 2022.

The data were collated from spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world, and are described in Hudson et. al. (2016) (doi:10.1002/ece3.2579).

This package accesses the latest version of the open-access database as a dataframe, and is under active development.

Installation

Installation from CRAN proceeds as usual:

install.packages("predictsr")

You can also install the development version of predictsr from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("Biodiversity-Futures-Lab/predictsr")

Then as usual just load the package:

library(predictsr)

Usage

To pull in the database and get the data, use the GetPredictsData function:

predicts <- GetPredictsData()

which by default will read in the 2016 and 2022 data, as a dataframe.

To read in the site-level summaries:

summaries <- GetSitelevelSummaries()

which will also, by default, read in the 2016 and 2022 data, as a dataframe.

To read in the descriptions of the columns of the database extract:

columns <- GetColumnDescriptions()

which will give you a dataframe on the information on the columns that are in the database extract.

Notes

The Natural History Museum cannot warrant the quality or accuracy of the data.

This package builds upon the NHM data portal API, which by default has no API rate limits. Please respect this and be responsible with your access. See also the terms and conditions on the use of the Data Portal.