Dealing with taxonomic inconsistencies within and across datasets is a fundamental challenge of ecology and evolutionary biology. Accounting for species synonyms, taxa splitting and unification is especially important as aggregation of data across time and different data sources becomes increasingly common.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dickens might have meant it figuratively, but in the case of the rOpenSci OzUnconf 2019, we mean it literally. Set to the backdrop of a national emergency that is still ongoing from 11-13 December, our participants came from across Australia as well as New Zealand, Japan, India and Indonesia.

The latest version of the rOpenSci av package includes some useful new tools for working with audio data. We have added functions for reading, cutting, converting, transforming, and plotting audio data in any popular audio / video format (mp3, mkv, aac, etc). The functionality can either be used by itself, or to prepare audio data for further analysis in R using other packages.

babette ¹ is a package to work with BEAST2 ² ,a software platform for Bayesian evolutionary analysis from R. babette is a spin-off of my own academic research.As a PhD I work on models of diversification: mathematical descriptionsof how species form new species.

In January 2019, we announced the release of rOpenSci’s Code of Conduct version 2.0. This includes a named Committee, greater detail about unacceptable behaviors, instructions on how to make a report, and information on how reports are handled. We are committed to transparency with our community while upholding of victims and people who report incidents.

One year ago, we released our new Code of Conduct. At that time, the Code of Conduct Committee (authors of this post) agreed to do an annual review of the text, reporting form, and our internal guidelines. We have made one change to the Code of Conduct text.

Want to get some hands-on insights into running an open source community? Here’s an opportunity to work with me, rOpenSci’s Community Manager, on some non-code community-related work. I am looking for someone to work 1 day a week for 12 to 14 weeks. Working alongside rOpenSci’s Community Manager, Stefanie Butland, you will use guidelines and checklists to help run some of our established programs like our Blog and Community Calls.

We mean it. On behalf of rOpenSci, thank you to everyone who has contributed their creativity, curiosity, smarts, and time in the last year. We are fortunate to have paid staff who work to build technical and social infrastructure to lower barriers to working with research data. But it is our community, built on trust, that binds us together and helps us see who we are working for.

🔗rOpenSci HQ rOpenSci Announces a New $896k Award From The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to Improve the Scientific Package Ecosystem for R. We’re excited to announce a new member of our team! Introducing Mark Padgham, rOpenSci’s new Software Research Scientist NumFOCUS recognizes Melina Vidoni and Will Landau for their contributions to rOpenSci.

Last year we reported on the joy of using commonmark and xml2 to parseMarkdown content, like the source of this website built withHugo, in particular to extractlinks,at the time merely to count them. How about we go a bit further and usethe same approach to find links to be fixed? In this tech note we shallreport our experience using R to find broken/suboptimal links and fixthem. 🔗What is a bad URL?

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes surethat your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to makechanges moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has brokenexisting functionality. Our recent community call on testing is a niceplace to get started with testing. One way to make testing even harder is through including HTTP requests.