database

I attended the recent useR 2016 conference at Stanford, USA, where I presented a talk on the technologies for building and distributing the Biomass And Allometry Database. All talks were recorded (see also below) and slides are available here. The talk compliments a post on the ropensci blog and our 2015 data paper in Ecology. Aside from the conference, a highlight of the trip for me was doing a bit of Ecotourism with Dr Will Cornwell in redwood forests and Californian chaparral.

Together with 92 other co-authors, we recently published the Biomass And Allometry Database (BAAD) as a data paper in the journal Ecology, combining data from 176 different scientific studies into a single unified database. Proud to present "BAAD: a biomass and allometry database for woody plants". http://t.co/9dEQAeaoSK Warm thanks to all contributors #data — Daniel Falster (@adaptive_plant) May 7, 2015 We built BAAD for several reasons: we needed it for our own work we perceived a strong need within the vegetation modelling community for such a database, and because it allowed us to road-test some new methods for building and maintaining a database.

In this post on the ropensci blog we discuss some of the challenges we had to overcome in combining data from 176 different scientific studies to the Biomass And Allometry Database (BAAD), recently published as a data paper in the journal Ecology.