date_start not formatted as date

[abahl4]

#Get occurrences for salpa thompsoni from OBIS - note that this may take some time to run:
my_occs <- robis::occurrence(scientificname = "Salpa thompsoni")

>my_occs$date_end[1]
[1] 474940800000

The name of the columns for date_start, date_mid, and date_end does not match the documentation seen in link below:
https://seamap.env.duke.edu/help/download_main

The date format "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" is not correct - is there a different format for these columns?

I am using robis version 2.10.1 and R version 4.1.1

[pieterprovoost]

Hi @abahl4, that documentation is specific to OBIS SEAMAP and most of the fields mentioned there are not present in the robis results (unless the names coincidentally correspond). In addition to the Darwin Core fields, robis returns a few extra fields which are documented here: https://obis.org/data/access/. date_end is a unix timestamp which can be converted to POSIXct or the required date format like this:

> date_end <- as.POSIXct(my_occs$date_end[1] / 1000, origin = "1970-01-01")
> date_end
[1] "1985-01-19 01:00:00 CET"
> strftime(date_end, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", tz = "UTC")
[1] "1985-01-19 00:00:00"

[abahl4]

Thank you so much for your quick and helpful reply!