Query Species Occurrence Records within an Area of Interest (AOI)

Downloads species occurrence records from providers (e.g., GBIF) using the spocc package, filtering the initial query by the exact polygonal boundary of the Area of Interest (AOI) for maximum efficiency and precision.

Usage

get_records(
  species,
  aoi_sf,
  providers = NULL,
  limit = 500,
  remove_duplicates = FALSE,
  date = NULL
)

Arguments

species

Character string specifying the species name to query (e.g., "Puma concolor").

aoi_sf

An sf object defining the Area of Interest (AOI). Its CRS will be transformed to WGS84 (EPSG:4326) before query.

providers

Character vector of data providers to query (e.g., "gbif", "inat"). If NULL (default), all available providers are used.

limit

Numeric. The maximum number of records to retrieve per provider. Default is 500.

remove_duplicates

Logical. If TRUE, records with identical longitude and latitude are removed using dplyr::distinct(). Default is FALSE.

date

Character vector specifying a date range (e.g., c('2000-01-01', '2020-12-31')).

Value

An sf object of points containing the filtered occurrence records, with geometry confirmed to fall strictly within the aoi_sf boundary.

Details

The function transforms the aoi_sf polygon into a WKT string, which is used in the spocc::occ geometry argument. This method is more efficient than querying by the rectangular bounding box, as it reduces the number of irrelevant records downloaded. Final spatial filtering is performed using sf::st_intersection to ensure strict containment.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Assuming aoi_sf is a valid sf polygon
# puma_records <- get_records("Puma concolor", aoi_sf, providers = "gbif", limit = 1000)
# head(puma_records)
} # }