Introduction

The Crested caracara’s I talked about in my last post are sitting on top of a Giant Cardon Cacti (Pachycereus pringlei). I wanted to take a look to see if the cacti were as widely distributed in the area as the Caracaras.

Load the libraries

library(rgbif)
library(sf)
library(tidyverse)
library(rnaturalearth)
library(rnaturalearthdata)

Subset our search to only Southern Baja Sur.

baja_geometry <- paste('POLYGON((-112.632285206 22.4136232805, -109.1001807138 22.4136232805, -109.1001807138 25.4259663625, -112.632285206 25.4259663625, -112.632285206 22.4136232805))')

cacti <- occ_data(scientificName = "Pachycereus pringlei", hasCoordinate = TRUE, limit = 10000,
                     geometry = baja_geometry )

cacti_coords <- cacti$data[ , c("decimalLongitude", "decimalLatitude",
 "individualCount", "occurrenceStatus", "coordinateUncertaintyInMeters",
  "institutionCode", "references")]

I subset the larger dataset to just zoom in on Mexico and plot the appoximate location where my observation was.

cacti_obs <- data.frame(decimalLongitude = c(-110.18917658541324), decimalLatitude = c(23.369598786877447))

world_maps <- ne_countries(scale = "medium", returnclass = "sf")
mexico <- subset(world_maps, name == "Mexico")

ggplot(data = mexico) +
                geom_sf() +
                geom_point(data = cacti_obs, aes(x = decimalLongitude, y = decimalLatitude), color = 'red')

Zoom into the Baja penninsula and plot all the points. There have been many observations of both the Giant Cardon Cacti and the Crested caracara all over the general region I visited.

theme_set(theme_bw())
ggplot(data = mexico) +
        geom_sf() +
        geom_point(data = cacti_coords, aes(x = decimalLongitude, y = decimalLatitude), color = 'blue') +
        geom_point(data = cacti_obs, aes(x = decimalLongitude, y = decimalLatitude), color = 'red')

ggplot(data = mexico) +
        geom_sf() +
        geom_point(data = cacti_coords, aes(x = decimalLongitude, y = decimalLatitude), color = 'blue') +
        geom_point(data = cacti_obs, aes(x = decimalLongitude, y = decimalLatitude), color = 'red') +
        coord_sf(xlim = c(-115, -109), ylim = c(22.5, 27), expand = TRUE) +
        xlab("Longitude") + ylab("Latitude")

ggsave("~/DATA/images/cardon-cacti-map.png")