Interface to the FWS NWRSpecies Occurrence Database API • nwrspeciesr

Note: This project was developed with the assistance of Claude, a generative AI tool developed by Anthropic. AI-generated content has been reviewed and edited by the package maintainer, who takes responsibility for the final content.

Overview

nwrspeciesr is an R interface to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Wildlife Refuge System species occurrence database (NWRSpecies, formerly FWSpecies). It provides functions to retrieve refuge species lists and related lookup values from the public NWRSpecies web services.

Current functionality (read-only) includes:

get_species_list(): retrieve species occurrence records, with optional filters for region, refuge, taxonomic category, occurrence, and ITIS TSN.
download_species_list(): retrieve the full species list via the CSV download endpoint (useful for pulling all records in a single call).
get_species_categories(): list valid taxonomic category values.
get_species_occurrences(): list valid occurrence values.

Only the public SpeciesListBasic method is currently exposed by the API. Sensitive species and records with a Draft status are never returned. Functions to create and edit records are planned for a future release, pending availability of the corresponding web service.

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("USFWS/nwrspeciesr")

Usage

library(nwrspeciesr)

# All bird species recorded as Present across Region 7 refuges
get_species_list(region_number = 7, category_name = "Bird",
                 occurrence = "Present")

# A single refuge by unit (cost center) code
get_species_list(refuge_code = "FF07RKDK00")

# Look up valid filter values
get_species_categories()
get_species_occurrences()

# Retrieve all records for a refuge via the CSV download endpoint
download_species_list(refuge_code = "FF07RKDK00", rows_per_page = 130000)

Filtering by refuge name

You can filter by refuge name instead of unit code. Matching is case-insensitive and tolerant of common variants (e.g. “Kenai”, “kenai nwr”, “Kenai National Wildlife Refuge”):

get_species_list(refuge_name = "kenai nwr")

Because the API filters on unit code rather than name, name matching relies on a refuge crosswalk. A bundled snapshot (the refuges dataset) is used by default. For a current table, use get_refuges(), which pulls live from the FWS Unit REST API via the fwsunitr package, and pass it via the crosswalk argument:

get_species_list(refuge_name = "Kenai", crosswalk = get_refuges())

Names that match more than one refuge (e.g. “Yukon”, which matches both Yukon Delta and Yukon Flats) return an informative error listing the candidates, so you can supply a more specific name.

Getting help

Contact the project maintainer for help with this repository. If you have general questions on creating repositories in the USFWS DGEC, reach out to a USFWS DGEC owner.

Contribute

Contact the project maintainer for information about contributing to this repository. Submit a GitHub Issue to report a bug or request a feature or enhancement.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Zero Universal v1.0 License.