This is a contribution of by Benjamin William Barrett who is a PhD student at the Health and Biomedical Informatics track of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Health Sciences Integrated PhD (HSIP) program. He was geocoding healthcare encounters within a singular, privacy-preserving, environment via containerization and Docker but struggled to get the {appeears} R package authentication working.
I provided some guidance, mainly the use of a pre-created or spoofed keying, to avoid any user interaction in such a non-interactive setup.
I’m happy to announce that the {skytrackr} package is on its way to CRAN. The {skytrackr} R package provides a convenient template fitting methodology and a Bayesian based optimization approach to estimate locations from light profiles. In my research together with Lyndon Kearsley we’ve used geolocation by light extensively to track swifts (an example light profile, as recorded during a year by a micro-logger on the back of a swift, is shown below).
Today we received the news from Dr. Michele Thornton at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that the DAYMET API they host will be decommissioned. This change will be effective within weeks and affect first and foremost the spatial (gridded) data products, before most likely covering the whole THREDDS data server setup including point based data.
In short, it is unlikely that the DAYMET API at ORNL will be maintained for much longer (past the end of the year).