Introduction
Do Exercise 1: Supplemental Data Discussion
Types of supplementary data
- climate
- weather
- species distribution
- gene annotation
- biometrics (average biomass, productivity, length, etc)
- taxonomy
- …
How to find good sources for this data?
- scientific literature
- governments - federal, state, local
- one-off data search:
WorldClim
- Global climate data product
- Bioclim variables
- average for the years 1970-2000
- good for site characterization
Do Exercise 2: Worldclim data
- what about the “moving targets” (e.g. taxonomy, weather, streamflow)?
API Basics
Application Programming Interface
-
Web APIs allow serving of data by connecting databases through customizable URL addresses to interactively generate datasets.
- In other words, run a query against a database over the web.
- But do so programmatically, so that you can do inside code!
- Example: HOSTS: Epargyreus
- URL contains “?” followed by parameters defined by “=”
- in this case, returns a structured web table (show source)
- you could generate some code to download this table, and parse the data out…
… or you could leave it to someone else to do it for you!