dateFindR: Find dates in other columns

In BeeBDC: Occurrence Data Cleaning

Find dates in other columns

Description

A function made to search other columns for dates and add them to the eventDate column. The function searches the columns locality, fieldNotes, locationRemarks, and verbatimEventDate for the relevant information. Additionally, for date ranges in the eventDate column, these will Be translated into startDayOfYear and endDayOfYear and the eventDate will be kept as the last date, but formatted in the correct format. Ambiguous dates that can't be parsed reliably as day-month-year or month-day-year will be rounded to the nearest certainty; if month or day can be identified with a spelled-out month or a day >12, these wil be correctly formatted. Year-month-day... is the most-reliable format

Usage

dateFindR(data = NULL, maxYear = lubridate::year(Sys.Date()), minYear = 1700)

Arguments

data	A data frame or tibble. Occurrence records as input.
maxYear	Numeric. The maximum year considered reasonable to find. Default = lubridate::year(Sys.Date()).
minYear	Numeric. The minimum year considered reasonable to find. Default = 1700.

Value

The function results in the input occurrence data with but with updated eventDate, year, month, and day columns for occurrences where these data were a) missing and b) located in one of the searched columns.

Examples

# Using the example dataset, you may not find any missing eventDates are rescued (dependent on 
# which version of the example dataset the user inputs.
beesRaw_out <- dateFindR(data = beesRaw,
                         # Years above this are removed (from the recovered dates only)
                         maxYear = lubridate::year(Sys.Date()),
                         # Years below this are removed (from the recovered dates only)
                         minYear = 1700)

BeeBDC documentation built on Nov. 5, 2025, 5:25 p.m.