CSV to EBVcube conversion function

[peterdesmet]

1. One of the goals of the B-Cubed project was to deposit certain species occurrence cubes (e.g. birds in Europe) as reference datasets on the EBV Data Portal.

   @linamaes or others, has that been done? If so, what pipeline/process was used for this?

2. Related to that, a conversion function was suggested, that would:

   1. Take a species occurrence cube created by the GBIF SQL download API (a TSV file, see example)
   2. Check if the necessary columns are there (since the SQL download API can create much more than cubes)
   3. Convert the data to the EBV netCDF format that 1) is readable by ebvcube and 2) could be deposited on the EBV Data Portal.

   Is there such an implementation in the ebvcube package? Are there plans for it? Is there still a need for it? Note that this conversation function would be well-suited for the ebvcube package. Better at least than the GBIF SQL Download service (see here why).

/cc @qgroom

[linamaes]

Hi Peter,

1. Data mobilisation from GBIF to the EBV portal was achieved for species listed in the Birds Directive and the IAS of Union concern in M10. Interoperability strategy document. The document provides a step-by-step explanation of the workflow, and the scripts can be found on GitHub.

[peterdesmet]

Great! Do you see a gain in implementing some of these steps in the ebvcube R package?

[linamaes]

2. Our thoughts on this are as follows:
   - EBV cubes are primarily the result of data modelling, forecasting or indicators. Therefore, occurrence cubes act as the first step in this process.
   - Due to the versatile results of the SQL, the function would be highly user-specific and constrained to very specific SQL types (e.g. simple metrics) or aggregated occurrences by grid cells, which is equivalent to species occurrence but in a raster format.
   - Instead, we created a series of notebooks that guide the entire process. These cover everything from (i) creating the species occurrence cubes, to (ii) calculating simple metrics, to (iii) converting them into published EBV netCDF files.