get_ems_data: get EMS data from BC Data Catalogue
In bcgov/rems: Get Data from British Columbia's Environmental Monitoring System

get_ems_data

R Documentation

get EMS data from BC Data Catalogue

Description

EMS data are distributed through the BC Data Catalogue under the Open Government License - British Columbia. This function downloads the chosen data ('historic' - 1964-2014, or '2yr' or '4yr') and imports it into your R session. It also caches the data so subsequent loads are much faster - if the data in the Data Catalogue are more current than that in your cache, you will be prompted to update it.

Usage

get_ems_data(
  which = "2yr",
  n = Inf,
  cols = "wq",
  force = FALSE,
  ask = TRUE,
  dont_update = FALSE,
  check_only = FALSE
)

Arguments

`which`	Defaults to `"2yr"` (past 2 years). You can also specify "4yr" to get the past four years of data. If you want historic data, use the `download_historic_data` and `read_historic_data` functions.
`n`	how many rows of the data do you want to load? Defaults to all (`n = Inf`).
`cols`	which subset of columns to read. Can be `"all"` which reads all columns, `"wq"` (default) which returns a predefined subset of columns common for water quality analysis, or a character vector of column names (see details below).
`force`	Default `FALSE`. Setting to `TRUE` will download new data even if it's not out of date on your computer.
`ask`	should the function ask for your permission to download and cache data on your computer? Default `TRUE`
`dont_update`	should the function checking for updates to the data and simply load the data from the cache? Default `FALSE`
`check_only`	should the function retrieve the data from the cache or just check it's existence and currency? Default `FALSE`

Details

cols can specify any of the following column names as a character vector:

"EMS_ID", "MONITORING_LOCATION", "LATITUDE", "LONGITUDE", "LOCATION_TYPE", "COLLECTION_START", "COLLECTION_END", "LOCATION_PURPOSE", "PERMIT", "PERMIT_RELATIONSHIP", "DISCHARGE_TO", "REQUISITION_ID", "SAMPLING_AGENCY", "ANALYZING_AGENCY", "COLLECTION_METHOD", "SAMPLE_CLASS", "SAMPLE_STATE", "SAMPLE_DESCRIPTOR", "PARAMETER_CODE", "PARAMETER", "ANALYTICAL_METHOD_CODE", "ANALYTICAL_METHOD", "RESULT_LETTER", "RESULT", "UNIT", "METHOD_DETECTION_LIMIT", "MDL_UNIT", "QA_INDEX_CODE", "UPPER_DEPTH", "LOWER_DEPTH", "TIDE", "AIR_FILTER_SIZE", "AIR_FLOW_VOLUME", "FLOW_UNIT", "COMPOSITE_ITEMS", "CONTINUOUS_AVERAGE", "CONTINUOUS_MAXIMUM", "CONTINUOUS_MINIMUM", "CONTINUOUS_UNIT_CODE", "CONTINUOUS_DURATION", "CONTINUOUS_DURATION_UNIT", "CONTINUOUS_DATA_POINTS", "TISSUE_TYPE", "SAMPLE_SPECIES", "SEX", "LIFE_STAGE", "BIO_SAMPLE_VOLUME", "VOLUME_UNIT", "BIO_SAMPLE_AREA", "AREA_UNIT", "BIO_SIZE_FROM", "BIO_SIZE_TO", "SIZE_UNIT", "BIO_SAMPLE_WEIGHT", "WEIGHT_UNIT", "BIO_SAMPLE_WEIGHT_FROM", "BIO_SAMPLE_WEIGHT_TO", "WEIGHT_UNIT_1", "SPECIES", "RESULT_LIFE_STAGE"

The default value of cols is "wq", which will return a data frame with the following columns:

"EMS_ID", "MONITORING_LOCATION", "LATITUDE", "LONGITUDE", "LOCATION_TYPE", "COLLECTION_START", "LOCATION_PURPOSE", "PERMIT", "SAMPLE_CLASS", "SAMPLE_STATE", "SAMPLE_DESCRIPTOR", "PARAMETER_CODE", "PARAMETER", "ANALYTICAL_METHOD_CODE", "ANALYTICAL_METHOD", "RESULT_LETTER", "RESULT", "UNIT", "METHOD_DETECTION_LIMIT", "QA_INDEX_CODE", "UPPER_DEPTH", "LOWER_DEPTH"