vegbankr-0.1.0

This is the initial release of the vegbankr package, with functionality for retrieving data from the VegBank system via its public REST API.

Core functionality

The package provides query capabilities for 12 different VegBank resource types: plot observations, taxon observations, taxon interpretations, plant concepts, community classifications, community interpretations, community concepts, projects, parties, references, cover methods, and stratum methods. Most of these support different options for controlling the level of detail returned by the API, and several also include search and sorting capabilities (plot observations, plant concepts, community concepts, projects, and parties).

Querying functions support 3 different query types:

Single-record queries

Query for a single record of a given resource type (e.g., a plot observation), using its VegBank record identifier.

Cross-resource collection queries

Query for the collection of records of a given resource type (e.g., plot observations) associated with a single record of a different resource type (e.g., a project), using the VegBank record identifier for the linked resource. Query results are paginated, returning the first 100 records by default.

Full collection queries

Query for the full collection of records of a given resource type (e.g., plot observations), potentially filtered by a search term. Query results are paginated, returning the first 100 records by default.

Additional features

• Configurable API base URL (defaults to https://api.vegbank.org)
• Debug reporting for API calls, with 3 verbosity levels
• Query for record counts without retrieving full datasets
• Choice of JSON or Parquet serialization formats (both returned as data frames)
• Access to pagination metadata (limit, offset, returned count, total count) for batch processing of large datasets