{NCIFD} — An Internal R Package for a Fisheries Agency

Abstract

We developed an R package for the Inland Fisheries Division of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to help team members share R functions and data sets. The {NCIFD} package stores several functions that were developed for agency research, including cleanBIODE(), which cleans query results from a database of standardized fish samples and imports the data into an R session. In addition, {NCIFD} stores a variety of data sets including observations from ongoing research projects, hatchery records, and administrative information. Stored in a package, data sets are instantly available for exploration and analysis in an R session, can share a common naming convention, and retain their metadata. Although developing an R package requires effort, we believe it is a useful tool that other fisheries agencies should encourage interested staff to explore. We share advice to help others get started while avoiding some missteps we encountered.