Introduction

bdDwC is a R package that supplies an interactive Shiny app and a set of functions for standardizing field names in compliance to the Darwin Core (DwC) format. bdDwC is a key element in the bdverse– a collection of tools, that form a general framework for facilitating biodiversity science in R.

bdDwC in the bdverse

bdDwC in the bdverse

What is the Darwin Core standard?

Darwin Core (DwC) is a global standard for publishing biodiversity data, whose goal is to facilitate the sharing of biodiversity information, by providing identifiers, labels, and definitions (Wieczorek et al. 2012). DwC was established as an evolving community-developed standard, by the Biodiversity Information Standards Working Group (www.tdwg.org). DwC is a library of definitions of common biodiversity data terms, each of which represents a field within the database. There are around 200 such fields (not including DwC extensions); a full set of the DwC terms with their descriptions is available in the Quick Reference Guide (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms). For more information see section 6.

Why it’s important to “Darwinize” a dataset

Running the Darwinizer enables you to standardize many field names in your dataset – and that allows the bdverse to handle data from various biodiversity portals seamlessly, and lets you enjoy all of bdvers features, regardless of publishers variation in field names.

References

Wieczorek, John, David Bloom, Robert Guralnick, Stan Blum, Markus Döring, Renato Giovanni, Tim Robertson, and David Vieglais. 2012. “Darwin Core: an evolving community-developed biodiversity data standard.” PloS One 7 (1): e29715.