Chapter 5 rbison
5.1 What is rbison?
rbison is an R package that interfaces with the USGS Bison API.
USGS Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) is a web-based federal mapping resource that provides access to georeferenced (those with latitude and longitude coordinates) and non-georeferenced data describing the occurrence or presence of terrestrial and aquatic species recorded or collected by a person (or instrument) at a specific time in the United States, U.S. Territories, U.S. Marine Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), and Canada. Each record in a species occurrence dataset available in BISON will typically consist of a scientific name (genus and specific epithet), a date, and one or more geographic references such as a state name, county name, and/or decimal latitude and longitude coordinates. In addition to these typical data fields, species occurrence datasets often include many other data fields that describe each species occurrence event in more detail.
rbison allows one to pull species occurrence data from these datasets, inspect species occurance summaries, and then map species occurance within the US, within the contiguous 48 states, and/or at county or state level.
Current data providers for BISON can be found at https://bison.usgs.gov/providers.jsp
See https://bison.usgs.gov/doc/api.jsp for API docs for the BISON API.
rbison has two main search functions:
bison_solr(): use BISON service specific parameters plus Solr parameters. More flexible searching, and ideal for users familiar with Solr sytnax.bison(): higher level service without Solr inputs. This function, unlikebison_solr(), does have ability to search on a spatial area through theaoiparameter. see?bisonafter loading the package.
Make sure to run bison_datause() and bison_citation() to get the data use
agreement and the appropriate citation when citing BISON data.
