Recology has moved, go to
http://recology.info/2011/10/two-new-ropensci-r-packages-are-on-cran
Carl Boettiger, a graduate student at UC Davis, just got two packages on
CRAN. One is
treebase, which which handshakes with the
Treebase API. The other is
rfishbase, which connects with the
Fishbase, although I believe just scrapes XML content as there is no API. See development on GitHub for treebase
here, and for rfishbase
here. Carl has some tutorials on treebase and rfishbase at his website
here, and we have an official rOpenSci tutorial for treebase
here.
Basically, these two R packages let you search and pull down data from Treebase and Fishbase - pretty awesome. This improves workflow, and puts your data search and acquisition component into your code, instead of being a bunch of mouse clicks in a browser.
These two packages are part of the
rOpenSci project.
