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Importance of Hydrology Given that liquid water is essential to life on Earth, water research cuts across numerous disciplines including hydrology, meteorology, geography, climate science, engineering, ecology, and more. Numerous R packages have emerged from this diversity of approaches, and we recently gathered many of them into a new rOpenSci task view which we broadly titled ‘Hydrology’ and published to CRAN. Our intent is to be exhaustive and compile R packages to access, model, and summarise information related to the movement of water across the Earth’s landscape....
Our next Community Call, on March 27th, aims to help people learn about using rOpenSci’s R packages to access and analyze taxonomy and biodiversity data, and to recognize the breadth and depth of their applications. We also aim to learn from the discussion how we might improve these tools. Presentations will start with an introduction to the topic and details on some specific packages and we’ll hear from several people about their “use cases in the wild”....
Introduction stats19 is a new R package enabling access to and working with Great Britain’s official road traffic casualty database, STATS19. We started the package in late 2018 following three main motivations: The release of the 2017 road crash statistics, which showed worsening road safety in some areas, increasing the importance of making the data more accessible. The realisation that many researchers were writing ad hoc code to clean the data, with a huge amount of duplicated (wasted) effort and potential for mistakes to lead to errors in the labelling of the data (more on that below)....
We tend to know a good open source research software project when we see it: The code is well-documented, users contribute back to the project, the software is licensed and citable, and the community interacts and co-produces in a healthy, productive fashion. The academic literature 1 and community discourse 2 around research software development offer insight into how to promote the technical best-practices needed to produce some of these project attributes; however, the management of non-technical, social components of software projects are less visible and therefore less often discussed in best-practice pieces....
rOpenSci’s suite of packages is comprised of contributions from staff engineers and the wider R community, bringing considerable diversity of skills, expertise and experience to bear on the suite. How do we ensure that every package is held to a high standard? That’s where our software review system comes into play: packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process. For that process relying mostly on volunteer work, associate editors manage the incoming flow and ensure progress of submissions; authors create, submit and improve their package; reviewers, two per submission, examine the software code and user experience....
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