This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For scientists studying the ocean, finding the right data can sometimes be as challenging as figuring out what to do with it. Want to know seafloor depth, the location of underwater mountains or sea surface temperatures?
The information exists, but it can take considerable time and computer coding to pull it together from different sources and get it into the proper format. A team of researchers, including scientists at UC Santa Barbara, has developed a new tool designed to make that process easier so that scientists can focus on answering questions instead of cleaning data. The software package, called oceandatr, was developed in R, a widely used programming language for data analysis.
With a single command, users can access and organize a wide range of global ocean data sets and prepare them for analysis and mapping. The team describes the new package in a paper published in Ecology and Evolution. According to lead author Jason Flower, a project scientist at UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Markets Lab (emLab), the most important thing is that it can help anyone who wants geospatial ocean data get the data they need, in the format they want, quickly and easily.
Flower and his colleagues developed oceandatr in part through their work with the Waitt Institute on marine spatial planning in small island nations such as Vanuatu and Fiji. Planning the ocean's future requires data on seafloor maps, temperature and human activities such as fishing. Researchers often must gather that information from multiple sources and write new code to combine the data sets.
The team created oceandatr to simplify this process. Rather than repeatedly writing the same code, Flower and his colleagues turned their most commonly used programming scripts into ready-made functions in oceandatr. The R package organizes code for accessing commonly used ocean data sets, allowing researchers to prepare data for mapping and analysis with a single command.
Housed on GitHub, the software is freely available to any researcher. "This paper is unique, in that we weren't trying to answer a specific research question," said co-author Echelle Burns, a project scientist at emLab. "We were building a tool for marine scientists like us, who find themselves using the same data-pulling and organizing workflow over and over again." The package can retrieve a variety of spatial ocean data sets, including information about seafloor depth, seamount locations and sea surface temperature.
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