The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) provides tools to enable users of biodiversity information to find, access, combine and visualise data on Australian plants and animals; these have been made available from http://www.ala.org.au/. Here we provide a subset of the tools to be directly used within R.

The use-examples presented at the 2014 ALA Science Symposium are available in the package vignette, via (in R): vignette("ALA4R") and also as a pdf here.

In R:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("AtlasOfLivingAustralia/ALA4R")

You may see a warning about the Rtools package: you don't need to install this. You may also be asked about a location for the R.cache directory --- choose whatever you prefer here, ALA4R does not use R.cache.

If you wish to use the data.table package for potentially faster loading of data matrices (optional), also do:

install.packages("data.table")

First, ensure that libcurl is installed on your system --- e.g. on Ubuntu, open a terminal and do:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

or install libcurl4-openssl-dev via the Software Centre.

Then follow the instructions for Windows, above.