Building an Antarctic and Southern Ocean rOpenSci community

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) has been collaborating with rOpenSci to strengthen the Antarctic and Southern Ocean R/science communities. Their focus is on data and tasks that are common to Antarctic and Southern Ocean science, including supporting the development of R packages to meet Antarctic science needs, guides for R users and developers, active fora for open discussions, and strengthening connections with the broader science world.

This new category in our public discussion forum is a great place to contribute your Antarctic R knowledge, ask a question, or perhaps make a suggestion for Antarctic-related functionality that you feel is missing from the current R ecosystem.

Read the introductory blog post by Ben Raymond and Michael Sumner to learn about the first steps underway to build an Antarctic and Southern Ocean rOpenSci community, and the many ways you can get involved!

The post includes a demo of the packages bowerbird, raadtools, SOmap, and antanym using the track of an elephant seal as it moves from the Kerguelen Islands to Antarctica and back again.

Read the full post here: https://ropensci.org/blog/2018/11/13/antarctic/ and then share your thoughts!

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A great opportunity to ask questions, make suggestions, and contribute examples or packages! Encouraging the community to get involved through Slack and the discussion forum. Thanks to Ben and Mike for the fantastic demo!

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[migrated from Twitter reply]: This looks great! It’s not an rOpenSci package, but I think there are a lot of utilities in the oce package that would be helpful for this task view – particularly for ocean data: CTDs, sections, Argo floats, mapping, etc. I’d be happy to write a vignette or blog.

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Thanks @stefanie very excited to be part of this! Our blog post combines a lot techniques of the last few years that we’ve been able to make work with many colleagues in person and online.

Thanks @jessmt hoping we can encourage lots of R users to jump with questions and contributions!

@richardsc really appreciate you sharing this, oce is a fantastic package - Argo data in particular is something we only have brief experience with, so very much looking forward to a write up and exploring how our approach fits with the oce perspective.

Recently I’ve been rounding out the file scanning and data readers in raadtools and raadfiles to make them more useable, and thus suitable for inclusion in the task view.

At the moment I’m very focussed on dealing with 3D and 4D ecosystem model structures, and tools to visualize those in quadmesh in the browser with SymbolixAU’s mapdeck and Miles McBain’s r2vr.

It’s been great working with @Maschette on the SOmap package, that’s really helped round out some of the helpers we’ve needed for projected maps.

I’m also hoping soon to finish tidync and use it in raadtools more (I had to delay it in rOpenSci onboarding!!).

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@richardsc hi there, are you interested to write something? I’d love to see your vignette or blog post!

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