rOpenSci | Extracting eBird Data from a Polygon

One of the first things I took on when I started at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology was creating the auk R package for accessing eBird data. The entire eBird dataset can be downloaded as a massive text file, called the eBird Basic Dataset (EBD), and auk pulls out manageable chunks of the dataset based on various spatial, temporal, or taxonomic filters. I’m often asked “how do I extract data from within a polygon?” (usually “polygon” is replaced by “shapefile”, but I try to avoid that word since there’s good reasons to stop using shapefiles). Rather than answer these questions individually, I thought I’d do a quick post about how to do this with auk. Note that, at the time of posting, this requires auk version 0.4.1 or higher, which can be installed with:


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://ropensci.org/blog/2020/04/16/ebird-polygon/