{read.abares}: Simple downloading and importing of ABARES Data

An R package for automated downloading and ingestion of data from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences. Data serviced include:

• ABARES Estimates;
  • Historical National Estimates;
  • Historical State Estimates;
  • Historical Regional Estimates;
  • Estimates by Size;
  • Estimates by Performance Category;
• the Australian Gridded Farm Data (AGFD) set;
• the Australian Agricultural and Grazing Industries Survey (AAGIS) region mapping files and the
• a Soil Thickness for Australian areas of intensive agriculture of Layer 1 (A Horizon - top-soil) (derived from soil mapping) map.

The files are freely available as CSV files, zip archives of NetCDF files or a zip archives of geospatial shape files. {read.abares} facilitates downloading, caching and importing these files in your R session with your choice of the class of the resulting object(s).

Get Started

Installation

{read.abares} is not available through CRAN (yet). But you can install it like so:

if (!require("remotes"))
  install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_git("https://codeberg.org/adamhsparks/read.abares")

Features

Caching

{read.abares} supports caching the files using tools::R_user_dir(package = "read.abares", which = "cache") to save the files in a standardised location across platforms so you don’t have to worry about where the files went or if they’re still there. When requesting the files, {read.abares} will first check if they are available locally. Caching is not mandatory, you can just work with the downloaded files in tempdir(), which is cleaned up when your R session ends. get_agfd() will always check first if the files are available locally, either cached or in your current R session’s tempdir() to save time by not downloading again if they are available already.

Multiple Classes Supported

{read.abares} supports multiple classes of objects to support your workflow. Select from spatial classes:

• {stars},
• {terra} or
• {tidync}

or data.frame objects:

• {data.table}

Metadata

Please report any issues or bugs.

License: MIT

Citing the data: Please refer to the ABARES website, https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/citations, on how to cite these data when you use them.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the {read.abares} project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.