Read a FishBase or SeaLifeBase Table — fishbase

This function returns one table of FishBase or SeaLifeBase, such as "species" (names, habitat, maximum length, ...) or "estimate" (trophic level, temperature preference, ...). It is read from the copy downloaded on this computer:

when the computer is online, the newest release is looked up first, and the table is downloaded if it is not on this computer yet;
when the computer is offline (or with fao_settings(online = FALSE)), the newest downloaded release that has the table is used, with a message.

Releases are fixed snapshots, so a downloaded table is identical to the one online.

Usage

fishbase_table(
  table,
  server = c("fishbase", "sealifebase"),
  version = "latest",
  data_dir = fao_data_dir()
)

Arguments

table: The table name, e.g. "species", "estimate", "ecology", "synonyms" or "families". check_fishbase_update() shows how many tables a release has; see the rfishbase documentation for what they contain.
server: "fishbase" (default) or "sealifebase".
version: The release, e.g. "26.06". Default is "latest".
data_dir: The directory where downloaded data is stored. Default is fao_data_dir().

Value

A data frame, with the attributes fishbase_server, fishbase_version and source_url.

References

Froese, R. and Pauly, D. (Eds.) FishBase. World Wide Web electronic publication. https://www.fishbase.se

Palomares, M.L.D. and Pauly, D. (Eds.) SeaLifeBase. World Wide Web electronic publication. https://www.sealifebase.se

Boettiger, C., Lang, D.T. and Wainwright, P.C. (2012). rfishbase: exploring, manipulating and visualizing FishBase data from R. Journal of Fish Biology 81(6): 2030-2039. doi:10.1111/j.1095-8649.2012.03464.x . Source code: https://github.com/ropensci/rfishbase

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
estimate <- fishbase_table("estimate")
attr(estimate, "fishbase_version")
} # }