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.
When starting a new year it always is good to look back at past achievements. Although the shifting geopolitical circumstances have soured the research climate, BlueGreen Labs' output remained strong throughout 2025. In the spirit of the end-of-year lists we've created our own.
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).
The CHELSA dataset provides access to climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas. Among those are the global climate-related predictors at kilometer resolution for the past and future (Brun et al. 2022) - generally known as bio-climatic variables. This dataset is provided through the main CHELSA website and links to a file download option which focuses on bulk file downloads.
However, it seems that the geotiffs provided are cloud optimized geotiffs (COG files).
Today I helped finalize the ICOS carbon portal PhenoCam server infrastructure setup, together with Jan Segers. We also adjusted the installation instructions to better reflect real world scenarios, this should help ICOS affiliated sites (and PhenoCam US location) setup their cameras. In addition, it was a fun reunion with old colleagues on the green campus at “Drie Eiken” of the University of Antwerp. I’m looking forward to stopping by more often the coming year within the context of the recent OSCARS grant collaboration.
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).
The past week BlueGreen Labs provided expert input at the Hermes Bring-Your-Own-Data (BYOD) workshop on text recognition and text analysis at the Leibniz-Institute for European History (IEG). The HERMES program provides resources teach topics in humanities education in research, data, and methods.
The workshop organized by Prof. Dr. Monika Barget brought together participants from the digital humanities to talk about data workflows, issues they encountered and the role of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within this context.