Research packages to improve site flagging/QAQC

[cristinamullin]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Regarding TADA_FlagCoordinates(): What is the basis for removing lat/longs with fewer than 3 decimal digits? A test dataset I ran through it flagged a lot of USGS sites that didn't necessarily seem erroneous, but perhaps did land in the vicinity of ##.##000? How do we know less than 3 digits is imprecise vs ending in 0000...?

Solutions considered

Consider leveraging existing packages to improve TADA site flagging/QAQC capabilities. Work may include creating a new site flag/QAQC function and/or improving an existing TADA site flag/QAQC function such as TADA_FlagCoordinates() or TADA_FindNearbySites().

Adding relevant note from Erik Leppo below (TADA Working Group follow up email):

"I ran across an article today that described some packages that did similar cleaning of coordinates albeit some for a specific purpose. But a number of the tests the package runs might be useful (missing, outside of study area, 0/0, at sea, political unit centroids, spatial outliers, conversion errors).

Here is the article: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2023/01/safe-and-simple-cleaning-of-species-occurrences/

The list of checks is here: https://ropensci.github.io/CoordinateCleaner/reference/index.html

The vignettes with good demos are here:
https://ropensci.github.io/CoordinateCleaner/articles/Cleaning_GBIF_data_with_CoordinateCleaner.html
https://ropensci.github.io/CoordinateCleaner/index.html

You may have already investigated the existing packages out there for coordinate and other data cleaning and this is old news for you. But if not then this is my small contribution to the project. The package seems to only do coordinate cleaning and is on CRAN (and ropensci) so it should stay supported and not get orphaned."