rfishbase
Went through demo of rfishbase with Tomomi. Improved error handling, added a few data types and a few use cases.
I always forget that I have to drop nulls by indexing, not my return values of sapply.
x[!sapply(x, is.null)]Very annoyed with fishbase id numbers (being discontinuous listings and unable to query xml by anything more intelligent). Querying all fishbase ids 1:30000, I get only 999 fish. hmm. Could this be an R memory issue? No sign of such errors. I also illustrate custom functions for processing output.
UPDATE: fixed these errors generally. Seemed specific to zero. Did run with some memory errors; hopefully avoided. See updated post 09-01-11.
require(rfishbase)
# Now let's just grab the entire fishbase database,
fish.data <- getData(1:30000)
length(fish.data)
[1] 999
habitatSearch <- function(keyword, fish.data){
# A function to search for the occurances of a keyword in habitat description
# Args:
# keyword: pattern to be used by grep
# fish.data: list of outputs from fishbase(), or from getData()
# Example:
# data <- getData(1:10)
# habitatSearch("feshwater", data)
x <- sapply(fish.data, function(x) grep(keyword, x$habitat) )
x <- as.integer(x)
}
x <- habitatSearch("reef", fish.data)
reef <- sum(x, na.rm=T)
nonreef <- sum(is.na(x))
percent_reef <- reef/(reef+nonreef)I’d like to be able to query fishbase by something other than fishbase’s own id numbers, but might have to make that database myself, since they don’t seem to be listed anywhere.
Taxize
Meanwhile, I’m looking into how we can query between common names and scientific names at different levels using the ROpenSci package taxize from Scott. I’ve just made a few modifications to handle some xml parsing with xpath expressions and formatting. Tweaked some functions in taxize.R script-set for grabbing scientific names. For instance, if I want all Plethodon salamanders in the Integrated Taxanomic Information System database
require(taxize)
xml <- get_itis_xml("Plethodon ")
out <- parse_itis(xml)
head(out)
sci tsn com
1 Plethodon aeneus 208328 <NA>
2 Plethodon ainsworthi 668315 Catahoula Salamander
3 Plethodon albagula 208278 Western Slimy Salamander
4 Plethodon amplus 668316 Blue Ridge Gray-cheeked Salamander
5 Plethodon angusticlavius 668317 Ozark Salamander
6 Plethodon asupak 685566 Scott Bar SalamanderNote I get common names, scientific names, and tsn id numbers. Using a tsn id number I can query the whole taxonomy, by querying by the given tsn ids:
> classification(685566)
rank taxon tsn..length.tsn..
1 Kingdom Animalia 202423
2 Phylum Chordata 158852
3 Subphylum Vertebrata 331030
4 Class Amphibia 173420
5 Order Caudata 173584
6 Family Plethodontidae 173631
7 Subfamily Plethodontinae 550197
8 Genus Plethodon 173648
9 Species Plethodon asupak 685566Pretty cool.