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Project Status: Active - The project has reached a stable, usable state and is being actively developed.

flyer

Geographic data from Steinbeck and Ricketts’ 1940 expedition to the Sea of Cortez. This is the original R package, which includes the data-cleaning code; the Python package contains only the data.

Installation

flyer is available only on GitHub. It can be installed using remotes or devtools like so:

install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('sagesteppe/flyer')

# remotes is very similar and a good alternative for this use case.
install.packages('remotes') 
remotes::install_github('sagesteppe/flyer')

Once installed, it can be attached like any other package from GitHub or CRAN:

library(flyer)

Data Accuracy

The original author is not a marine ecologist, nor nautically inclined; rather, they appreciate the journey as a philosophical exploration of ecology.

The goal of this package is to provide a readily available data set for cartographic activities — in particular, one composed of point and linestring geometries rather than the polygons typical of choropleth applications (such as the North Carolina SIDS data set that ships with sf). A further advantage of the data set is that it follows a sequential series of events, lending itself to story maps, interactive maps, and animations.

Consider the package very much alive: I am happy to merge increasingly accurate collection localities or routes. I have only read The Log from the Sea of Cortez, and not Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, or any of the other true catalogs from the voyage. I have also quickly poked through Brusca 2020 — a wonderful read that served as the definitive source for locations.

The ‘route’ of the Western Flyer is liberally digitized and redrawn from the Penguin Classics 1995 edition of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the accuracy of which I am unsure. I further embellished curvatures and shapes to make the data set aesthetically appealing. If you think you know the real route — as I imagine would have been recorded in the Flyer’s actual ship’s log — let me know and I’ll happily digitize it when I can find the time. If that happens, I will maintain both the aesthetic and the authentic routes as data sets in the package.

Contributing

I use this data set for testing our cartographic approaches. If you are a marine biologist, a mariner, or into data viz, and think you have some insight — but are hesitant about this whole Github thing — shoot me an email and we can figure out how to incorporate your perspective.

Download files directly

If you just want the data, two formats are available:

  • GeoPackage bundle — one zip containing a .gpkg per data set: flyer-geodata.zip
  • GeoJSON — individual .geojson files (one per data set), browseable at data_dl/geojson/

All layers are in EPSG:4326 (WGS 84). The landcover_palette.csv file included in both formats maps landcover classes to hex colors.

Works Cited

Brusca, Richard C. “The 1940 Ricketts-Steinbeck Sea of Cortez Expedition, with annotated lists of species and collection sites.” Journal of the Southwest 62, no. 2 (2020): 218-334.

freely available here

Sagarin, Raphael D., William F. Gilly, Charles H. Baxter, Nancy Burnett, and Jon Christensen. “Remembering the Gulf: changes to the marine communities of the Sea of Cortez since the Steinbeck and Ricketts expedition of 1940” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6, no. 7 (2008): 372-379.

An open-access nearly final version is here

Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Penguin, 1995.

Available from your local library, an independent bookstore, or a Barnes & Noble near you.

Spatial Data Sources

CONABIO CONANP, (09/2024). ‘Federal Protected Natural Areas of Mexico, September 2024’, National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity. Mexico City, Mexico.

GEBCO Compilation Group (2024) GEBCO 2024 Grid (doi:10.5285/1c44ce99-0a0d-5f4f-e063-7086abc0ea0f).

Robinson, N., Regetz, J., and Guralnick, R. P. (2014). EarthEnv-DEM90: A nearly-global, void-free, multi-scale smoothed, 90m digital elevation model from fused ASTER and SRTM data. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 87:2014, 57-67. Available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924271613002360

Tuanmu, M.-N. and W. Jetz. 2014. A global 1-km consensus land-cover product for biodiversity and ecosystem modeling. Global Ecology and Biogeography 23(9): 1031-1045.