Harmonise and integrate heterogeneous areal data with the R package arealDB
Areal data is a common data type to store information such as biodiversity inventories, socio-economic censuses or cadastral surveys. Many research questions require that areal data are integrated from multiple heterogeneous sources. Inconsistent concepts, terms, definitions, or messy tables makes data-wrangling an often tedious and error-prone process. A dedicated tool that assists in organising areal data still is lacking. Here, we introduce the R package arealDB that helps to harmonise and integrate heterogeneous areal data and associated geometries into a consistent database. The package is used to collect metadata, harmonise language and variable names, reshape messy into tidy data and integrate them in a standard data format. arealDB solves the specific problem of integrating disparate regional data sources on a given target variable, which may be published in different languages, with a different table arrangement or provided in various data formats. We guide the user step by step through the individual functions needed to integrate two such datasets using the example of the harvested area of soybean in Brazil and the USA. A database that has been built with arealDB is "tidy", and can thus be accessed easily with powerful and widespread tools such as the R meta-package tidyverse. Moreover, it is accompanied by provenance documentation that traces the full process of creation for each data point in the database. By offering easy-to-use tools for integrating areal data, arealDB promises substantial time-savings to database collation efforts, as well as quality-improvements to downstream scientific, monitoring, and management applications.
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