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Comparison · Infra & APIs
BIOMASS vs ggfootball
A side-by-side editorial comparison of BIOMASS and ggfootball — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
BIOMASS vs ggfootball: at a glance
What is BIOMASS?
A tropical-forest biomass staple modernising its geospatial stack without saying so
BIOMASS estimates aboveground biomass and its uncertainty in tropical forests and is well established in that niche. Its public changelog is close to empty: the most recent entry, 2.2.4, is a thirty-four character pointer to the NEWS file. The last release with readable content, 2.1.11, bundled six versions of work whose substantive part was migrating off sp and raster to sf and terra, and from httr to httr2.
What is ggfootball?
A football-viz package just swapped scraping for an API and broke its own output to do it.
ggfootball is a small R package for plotting expected-goals and shot data, sourced from Understat. Four releases are visible. The 0.2.x line was argument tidying and dependency pruning; 0.3.0 replaced the data-acquisition layer wholesale, moving get_match_shots() from HTML parsing onto Understat's AJAX endpoints and changing the returned column names in the process.
BIOMASS vs ggfootball: editorial side-by-side
BIOMASS
0.0INFRA · APIS
A tropical-forest biomass staple modernising its geospatial stack without saying so
◆ Current state
BIOMASS estimates aboveground biomass and its uncertainty in tropical forests and is well established in that niche. Its public changelog is close to empty: the most recent entry, 2.2.4, is a thirty-four character pointer to the NEWS file. The last release with readable content, 2.1.11, bundled six versions of work whose substantive part was migrating off sp and raster to sf and terra, and from httr to httr2.
◆ Where it's heading
The visible arc is dependency modernisation and CRAN compliance rather than science: retiring sp and raster ahead of their deprecation, failing gracefully when taxonomic services are unreachable, and repeatedly changing taxonomic backend as those services disappeared — taxosaurus to TNRS, then away from Tropicos once it was no longer maintained. The recurring fragility is correctTaxo(), which depends on third-party name resolution outside the maintainers' control.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next release to be another compliance or dependency response; on this feed's record the release notes will not say what changed, leaving the NEWS file as the only reliable source.
ggfootball
0.0INFRA · APIS
A football-viz package just swapped scraping for an API and broke its own output to do it.
◆ Current state
ggfootball is a small R package for plotting expected-goals and shot data, sourced from Understat. Four releases are visible. The 0.2.x line was argument tidying and dependency pruning; 0.3.0 replaced the data-acquisition layer wholesale, moving get_match_shots() from HTML parsing onto Understat's AJAX endpoints and changing the returned column names in the process.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is away from scraped HTML and toward a thinner, more defensible package: four dependencies dropped in 0.3.0 on top of qdapRegex in 0.2.1, input validation added, error messages rewritten. Both breaking changes so far were accepted rather than deferred, which reads as a maintainer treating pre-1.0 as the window to get the shape right. The package is willing to break callers for structural reasons, not cosmetic ones.
◆ Prediction
With the scraper rebuilt and the dependency surface trimmed, the next releases are likely to stabilise the new column names and extend the plotting side, which has seen nothing since 0.2.0. A 1.0 would be the signal that the data structure is now considered fixed.
Alternatives to BIOMASS and ggfootball
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either BIOMASS or ggfootball.
PINstimation
A market-microstructure toolkit that keeps adding estimators as the papers land.
nzilbb.vowels
A vowel-analysis package trimming dependencies after an email address got it archived.
emuR
The R half of the EMU speech database system, fixing what was quietly broken.
BAS
A Bayesian model-averaging package spending its 2.0 on memory, not methods.
tidyplots
tidyplots keeps rebuilding its own foundations rather than layering around them.
See all BIOMASS alternatives → · See all ggfootball alternatives →
Recent activity from BIOMASS and ggfootball
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 6mo agoggfootballggfootball 0.3.0 ⚡
- 6mo agoggfootballggfootball 0.2.2
- 11mo agoBIOMASSVersion 2.2.4 released on CRAN
- 1y agoggfootballggfootball 0.2.1
- 1y agoggfootballggfootball 0.2.0
- 1y agoBIOMASSMigration from sp/raster to sf/terra and httr to httr2
- 5y agoBIOMASSTNRS replaces taxosaurus for name resolution
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between BIOMASS and ggfootball?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. BIOMASS and ggfootball are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is BIOMASS better than ggfootball?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. BIOMASS and ggfootball are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to BIOMASS?
Top BIOMASS alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "BIOMASS alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/biomass for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ggfootball?
Top ggfootball alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggfootball alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggfootball for the full list with editorial commentary on each.