There’s an R package for this… right?
My journey in creating my first R package all started when I received an email from a colleague who was working with archived soil samples that were collected prior to the advent of GPS technology.
These samples were georeferenced using the Manitoba Original Survey Legal Descriptions, which originate from the Dominion Land Survey system, introduced in the late 19th century to organize the European settlement and colonization of Western Canada.
I was asked by my colleague if there was an R package that could locate these samples so they could be plotted on a map.
There wasn’t.
The data was publicly available so I wrote a short script that searched the data set for the legal land description and returned the coordinates.
This morphed into a series of functions, which eventually turned into a package!
And thanks to the encouragement of the rOpenSci community assistant, Steffi LaZerte, I submitted my package for peer review.
That is how mbquartR was born.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://ropensci.org/blog/2025/03/25/r-package-review