Scientific reuse of open biodiversity information from national Living Atlases infrastructures: Using ALA4R for reproducible research studies

During the last few years, a large number of countries have deployed national customized versions of The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) (https://www.ala.org.au/), which is a collaboratively developed, open infrastructure for collecting and presenting biodiversity data nationally and for sharing it globally through GBIF (https://gbif.org). The increasing number of national nodes deploying this free and open source software platform has built a worldwide community involving more than 17 countries, that collaborate openly in a decentralized way (https://living-atlases.gbif.org/), helping each other out by organizing technical workshops and by developing and sharing new software modules using GitHub. One of these modules in the Living Atlases infrastructure is an R package called ALA4R originally created by Ben Raymond (https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia/ALA4R). It provides the research community with programmatic data access to many of the Living Atlases data services using R. This presentation will show how ALA4R can be used to access data from different national Living Atlases nodes and how this R package can enable research studies that utilize methods and practices for reproducible workflows that are being increasingly established within the research community (https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/guide-to-reproducible-code.pdf)