The easyclimate R package: easy access to high-resolution daily climate data for Europe

Abstract

In recent decades there has been an increasing demand by ecologists for harmonized climatic data at large spatial scales and spanning long periods. Here we present easyclimate, a software package to obtain daily climatic data at high resolution (0.0083º, ~1 km) with R. The package facilitates the downloading and processing of precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures for Europe from 1950 to 2020. Using easyclimate and given a set of coordinates (points or polygons) and dates (days or years), the user can download the climatic information as a tidy table or a raster object. In this package we implemented Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs which provide access to daily climate data for thousands of sites/days within minutes, without having to download huge rasters. Daily climate data are not available in many of the current climate databases and are essential for many ecological research questions and applications, including the study of the effects of extreme climatic events related to late-spring frosts, heat waves, or dry periods on plant performance. easyclimate taps the potential for climatic data and enables multiple applications in forestry, ecological and vegetation studies across Europe.

Water use partitioning of native and non‐native tree species in riparian ecosystems under contrasting climatic conditions

“…Hereafter, we refer to these sites as dry, intermediate and wet sites (DRY, INT and WET, respectively) but note that DRY and WET sites are also warmer and colder, respectively. The climate at all sites is continental Mediterranean, but they differ in mean annual temperatures and accumulated precipitation with mean temperatures of 15.28, 14.23 and 12.96°C, respectively, and annual precipitation of 364, 487 and 413 mm (period 2000–2020, Cruz‐Alonso et al, 2022; Moreno & Hasenauer, 2016; Rammer et al, 2018). The drought period in this area usually lasts for 2–3 months during summer, being more pronounced at the DRY site compared to the WET one.…”

Forest structural diversity determines tree growth synchrony in response to climate change

“…; Fig 1). The studied forest is mainly composed of detrital sedimentary rocks and presents an oceanic climate (Cfb, Kottek et al, 2006), with average precipitation of 932 mm and average temperature of 13 ºC (data from easyclimate R package (Cruz-Alonso et al, 2021;Moreno & Hasenauer, 2016;Rammer et al, 2018)). Although F. sylvatica is the most abundant species, other tree species characteristic of European temperate forests can also be found (e.g.…”

“…We used daily data on precipitation and minimum and maximum temperatures from easyclimate R package (Cruz-Alonso et al, 2021;Moreno & Hasenauer, 2016;Rammer et al, 2018). We calculated total precipitation, number of late spring frosts (i.e.…”

Corrigendum

“…Corrected text: “First, we calculated the daily mean temperature offset , which corresponds to the difference between the daily mean microclimate temperature, as measured by the loggers, and the corresponding daily mean air temperature value at 2 m height for exactly the same month, year and grid cell from EOBS data with a spatial resolution of 1 km 2 ( Cruz‐alonso et al, 2022 ) . Moreover, the EOBS data underwent an altitudinal correction according to the lapse rate of that grid cell ( Karger et al, 2022 ) .…”