User-friendly WorldClim and CHELSA download and pre-processing with R-package ClimDatDownloadR

The consistent, highly resolved, globally available, and quality-controlled climate datasets and their derivatives are a central basis in the research field of species distribution modelling. Worldwide, the observation-based time series of WorldClim and CHELSA climate datasets have established themselves in this field. However, the download of the data through simple web interfaces is not very user-friendly and rather time-consuming. Individual adjustments, using additional software, must be carried out separately in pre-processing steps. The R-package ClimDatDownloadR simplifies and automates the download and pre-processing of these datasets. Our main objectives were providing an easy-to-use tool for a wider range of users of these datasets and ensuring that the individual customization is consistent and intuitively usable. Special attention was paid to optimise computational and memory intensive tasks. The package allows the selection of parameters, time series, spatial extents, output formats, and file management tools in advance. The ClimDatDownloadR is intended to be a computationally and memory efficient integration for downloading and pre-processing base data for R script-based species distribution modelling. For the future development, additional climate datasets like CRU will be integrated into the download options, while simultaneous runtime improvements are to be worked on.