1. Parse XML document with Darwin core terms to Google Spreadsheets

    The Darwin Core standard is a well established standard for archiving biodiversity data, including data from specimens in collections to observations of animals or plants at particular locations. I needed a simple formatted table describing the terms used in the Darwin Core standard, but struggled to find one. So, I wrote the script below wich parses the XML document containing the terms into a Google Spreadsheet. This will give two columns with the terms and the parent group to which they belong, if relevant, as well as a column containing the data type. …


  2. Retrieve Encyclopedia of life pics from Google Spreadsheets

    I recently had to find pictures corresponding to a relatively large number of species names. For doing this the Encyclopedia if Life is an interesting solution because it has a well developed API and it covers the entire breadth of taxonomic groups, from plants to animals, insects and everything in between. After copy-pasting several species names and urls, I realized it would probably be most efficient to automate this through a script in a Google Spreadsheet. …


  3. Geary's C and Moran's I functions in R

    Gearys’ C and Morans’I autocorrelograms are very common measures of spatial or temporal aucorrelation. Although there are functions to calculate these measures in R, I was surprised that I couldn’t find a perfectly satisfactory solution in any package. The functions used in spdep are based on distances through a neighbourhood matrix instead of straight Eucledian distances. Results obtained from them are therefore highly depdendent on the choice of the number of nearest neighbours. …


  4. Intercepting ODK Collect submission with PHP

    Open Data Kit is a great open source platform for mobile data collection. However, one of its major downsides is that there are no configurations possible to limit which user has access to which form and to which data. In short, every user on a given ODK Aggregate install has access to every form and every associated dataset on the server. Since this was inappropriate for our needs, we decided to create a layer of php files that intercept requests and submissions from ODK Collect and redirect them to ODK Aggregate. …


  5. Welcome to my space on the web!

    Welcome to Guillaume Larocque’s space on the web. I am a research professional at the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science. …