An R script to download data files from the LEDA trait database

download_leda_traitbase.R

# load packages
library(rvest)
library(here)

# create a new forder for storing data
folder_name <- here(paste0("leda_", lubridate::today()))
dir.create(folder_name)

# extract URLs and download files
read_html("https://uol.de/en/landeco/research/leda/data-files") %>%
  html_elements(xpath = "//a/@href") %>%
  html_text() %>%
  grep("Data_files", ., value = TRUE) %>%
  lapply(., function(x) download.file(x, here(folder_name, stringr::str_extract(x, "\\/([^/]*)$"))))