spocc

Our brand-new baby received a fantastic picture book as a gift: Possum magic, a classic for Aussie kids. Thanks, Miles! In that book, Hush the possum and her Grandma Poss encounter different Australian animals and travel across well eat their way through the country. It is an adorable story with great illustrations! Reading it will make you feel like travelling to Australia, for instance to useR! 2018, except you shouldn’t because it is a very scary country:

Rough night with 👶. ☕ was a good start but it was the balcony 🐍 capture and release that really 💓

— Miles McBain (@MilesMcBain) 25 d’agost de 2017

However, you can travel and learn geography without leaving the comfort of a snake-free home… by mapping Hush’s adventures! Which is what I decided to do.

Recently a reader left a comment on this blog mentioning his cool blog post in which he mapped the spread of a migratory bird using Twitter. His data source was the Waxwings UK account which reports sightings of Bohemian waxwings in the UK. I decided to try reproducing and extending his work using the rOpenSci spocc package that interfaces different sources of species occurrence data.