bbsAssistant: An R package for downloading and handling data and information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

This R package contains functions for downloading and munging data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) via FTP (Pardieck et al. 2018; J. R. Sauer et al. 2017). This package was created to allow the user to bulk-download the BBS point count and related (e.g., route-level conditions) via FTP, and to quickly subset the data by taxonomic classifications and/or geographical locations. This package also maintains data containing the trend and annual indices from the most recent (1996-2017) hierarchical population trend analyses.