Biodiversity Data from Social Networking Sites

by Vijay Barve for R Project for Statistical Computing

Ecology, Biodiversity, Climate Change, invasive species research etc. use Primary Biodiversity occurrence data as basic unit. Even Global Biodiversity Information Facility, largest repository of this data, which serves ~530M records, has gaps and biases in terms of taxonomy, geography and seasonality. We propose to make a R package to wrap the APIs of SNS like Flicke and Picasa and make the data available to users in prevailing international standard formats like Darwin Core and Audubon Core.