gecevar stands for “GEtting Climatic and other Environmental VARiables”. The package contains functions for downloading climate and environmental data from open and free online datasets for any region of the world. The data can be used for ecological studies. The area of interest can be a country, state or project area and is defined by an extent, vector file or country iso-code. Data comes from a variety of sources (e.g. Chelsa, OpenStreetMap, TropicalMoistForest, SRTMv4.1, SoilGrids). Climate and environmental data are available as multiband raster files at a resolution and in the coordinate reference system specified by the user. When possible, the package uses the properties of Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COGs) files to download only the portion of the global datasets corresponding to the area of interest, reducing download time. The package uses GDAL and the R libraries terra and sf for optimized processing of raster and vector geospatial data.

Make sure GDAL and GRASS GIS are installed on your system.

You can install gecevar from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("ghislainv/gecevar")

The gecevar R package is Open Source and released under the GNU GPL version 3 license. Anybody who is interested can contribute to the package development following our Contributing guide. Every contributor must agree to follow the project’s Code of conduct.