# mddmaps
The goal of mddmaps is to provide an interface to download and
manipulate spatial range maps for mammals according with Mammal
Diversity Database taxonomy. Currently the map version is related to MDD
v1.9. See below for further details
Figure 1. Package outline
## Installation
You can install the development version of mdd from
[GitHub](https://github.com/) with:
``` r
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("alrobles/mddmaps")
```
## Summary
Expert geographic range maps aligned to the taxonomy of the Mammal
Diversity Database (MDD) version 1.2 to 1.5, which was
[published](https://zenodo.org/record/4139818) on 24 Sept 2020. That
taxonomy includes 6,485 total species, of which 103 are considered
recently extinct, 20 are considered domestic extant, and 6,362 are
considered wild extant. For this mapping project, only 6,362 species
from MDD v1.2 have maps. The original source of this R package can be
found [here](https://zenodo.org/record/6644198). A cold storage of the
files can be found [here](https://zenodo.org/records/10974868)
Original files need 10 gigabytes of storage in a compressed format. For
the distribution of this R package, we decreased the resolution by
simplifying the lines of the polygons by removing vertices with a
tolerance of 1000 meters. We store the files as r binaries for more
efficient manipulation using the terra R package.
Finally we add a tutorial the possibility of filtering these polygons by
species and order. We also added a tutorial to create geographic filter
that returns the maps by country or continent. It is possible to crop
the maps with the country or leave the complete ranges that intersect
with that country.
In order to distribute this package, the maps are stored on a remote
cloud server. Once the user performs a query, a local copy of the maps
are stored on the users computer.
The functions first look to see if the maps are already stored on the
users computer, if not, it downloads them for future reference. Because
this service is managed with our own resources, we make this feature
notable to prevent the user from hitting our database every time a user
makes a query and in this way also offer a faster experience when
generating multiple queries. map sets.
## Basic usage
This is a basic example which shows how to look an specific map:
``` r
library(mddmaps)
library(terra) # for plot
#> Warning: package 'terra' was built under R version 4.2.3
#> terra 1.7.39
mammal <- get_mdd_map("Notoryctes caurinus")
plot(mammal)
```
