January New Data Packages

As forecast, the number of R packages hosted on CRAN exceed 10,000 in January. Dirk Eddelbuettel, who has been keeping track of what’s happeining on CRAN with his CRANberies site for a number of years, called [hurricaneexposure]() as the 10K package in a tweet on January 27th. hurricaneexposure was of two hundred and six new packages that arrived on CRAN in January. I thought many of them were of high quality so picking out recommendations was unusually difficult this month. Here are my picks for the top fifty organized into xxx categories.

Data

• elevatr v0.1.1: Provides access to several databases that provide elevation data including Mapzen Elevation Service, Mapzen Terrain Service, Amazon Terrain Tiles, and the USGS Elevation Point Query Service. There is a vignette.

• epidata v0.1.0: Provides tools to retrive data from the Economic Policy Institute README shows how to use the package.

• europop v0.3: Contains a dataset giving the populations of all European cities with at least 10,000 inhabitants during the period 1500-1800.

• fivethirtyeight v0.1.0: Provides the data, code and interactive visualizations behind FiveThirtyEight Stories. There is a vignette that privides an example of a data analysis, and a list of data sets that are included.

• getCRUCLdata v.1.1: Provides functions that automate downloading and importing climatology data from University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). There is vignette to get you started.

• hurricaneexposure v0.0.1: Allows users to create time series of tropical storm exposure histories for chosen counties for a number of hazard metrics (wind, rain, distance from the storm, etc.). The vignette provides an overview.

• metScanR v0.0.1: Provides functions for mapping, and gathering meteorological data from various US surface networks: COOP, USCRN, USRCRN, AL-USRCRN, ASOS, AWOS, SNOTEL, SNOTELLITE, SCAN, SNOW, and NEON

• mglR v0.1.0: Provides tools to download and organize large-scale, publicly available genomic studies on a candidate gene scale. The vignette shows how to use the package.

• nzpullover v0.0.2: Contains datasets of driving offences and fines in New Zealand between 2009 and 2016, originally published by the New Zealand Police.

• owmr v0.7.2: Provides a wrapper for the OpenWeatherMap API

• PeriodicTable v0.1.1: Contains a dataset of the properties of chemical elements.

• pwt9 v9.0-0: Contains the Penn World Table 9 which provides information on relative levels of income, output, inputs, and productivity for 182 countries between 1950 and 2014.

• rdwd v0.7.0: Provides functions to obtain climate data from the German Weather Service, Deutscher Wetterdienst, (DWD) There is a vignette on Weather Stations and another showing how to use the package.

• rwars v1.0.0: Provides functions to retrieve and reformat data from the ‘Star Wars’ API SWAPI. The vignette shows how to use the package.

• wikidataQueryServiceR v0.1.0: Provides an API Client Library for Wikidata Query Service which provides a way for tools to query Wikidata via SPARQL. See README for how to use it.

• wikilake v0.1: Provides functions to scrape metadata about lakes from Wikipedia. The vignette fetches data from Michigan lakes.

• worrms v0.1.0: Provides a client for the World Register of Marine Species. The vignette shows how to use the package.