ecotourism

The goal of ecotourism is to provide clean, ready-to-use datasets for example analyses in teaching, demos, and reproducible workflows.
It currently includes wildlife (e.g., cuttlefish) occurrence records, tourism counts by region, and local weather for matching locations.

Website

👉 Documentation site: https://vahdatjavad.github.io/ecotourism/

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
# pak::pak("vahdatjavad/ecotourism")
install.packages("ecotourism", repos = c('https://vahdatjavad.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

If you prefer remotes:

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("vahdatjavad/ecotourism")
install.packages("ecotourism", repos = c('https://vahdatjavad.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

What’s inside?

List all available datasets and their short titles:

Object	Title
glowworms	Glowworms Occurrence Data (2014–2024)
gouldian_finch	Gouldian Finch Occurrence Data (2014–2024)
manta_rays	Manta Ray Occurrence Data (2014–2024)
orchids	Orchid Occurrence Data (2014–2024)
oz_sa2	Australian Statistical Area Level 2 Boundaries
top_stations	Top Weather Stations for Each Organism
tourism_activity	Monthly Tourism Trips by Stopover Activity
tourism_activity_name	Tourism Stopover Activity Names
tourism_reason	Monthly Tourism Trips by Stopover Reason
tourism_reason_name	Tourism Stopover Reason Names
tourism_region	Tourism Regions and Nearest Weather Stations
weather	Daily Weather Data for Top Stations (2014–2024)
weather_stations	Australian Weather Station Metadata

This is the relational dataset in this package:

To see documentation for any dataset, use:

?ecotourism::DATASET_NAME

Teaching and assessment resources

Two companion resources make it easier to use these datasets in teaching:

• ecosanctuary is an R package for validating, selecting, and building reusable Quarto or R Markdown questions. It can produce Moodle XML, interactive student practice quizzes, teacher answer keys with worked solutions, printable PDFs, and a record of the selected questions.
• The GSoC 2026 ecotourism question bank is a ready-to-use collection of 45 R questions based on the datasets in this package. It contains 15 easy, 15 medium, and 15 hard questions that cover data exploration, transformation, visualisation, joins, functions, iteration, and multi-dataset analysis.

The question bank provides the teaching content, while ecosanctuary provides the tools that validate, select, and render that content. Lecturers can use the complete bank or select questions by ID, topic, and difficulty to create reproducible quizzes and teaching materials.

Example

This is a minimal usage sketch. Replace DATASET_NAME with one from the table above.

library(ecotourism)

# List datasets included in the package
utils::data(package = "ecotourism")

# Example workflow (replace DATASET_NAME with a real object from the list)
# data("DATASET_NAME", package = "ecotourism")
# head(DATASET_NAME)
# str(DATASET_NAME)

# Tip: quick summaries if dplyr is available:
# if (requireNamespace("dplyr", quietly = TRUE)) {
#   dplyr::glimpse(DATASET_NAME)
# }

Getting help

• Open an issue with a minimal reproducible example: https://github.com/vahdatjavad/ecotourism/issues
• Check the function/dataset help pages (e.g., ?ecotourism::DATASET_NAME).

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome! If you’re unsure where to start, open an issue first to discuss changes.

Citation

If you use ecotourism in teaching, demos, or research, please cite it:

citation("ecotourism")