flreefs bundles a cleaned snapshot of Florida’s artificial reef deployments, as published by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). The data frame reefs carries one row per deployment, 4,548 in all, and fetch_reefs() downloads whatever FWC publishes today.
Installation
flreefs is not on CRAN. Install the development version from source:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_git("https://git.robwiederstein.org/rkw/flreefs")Usage
library(flreefs)
str(reefs)
table(reefs$coast, reefs$jurisdiction)
#>
#> Federal State
#> Atlantic 758 530
#> Gulf 1213 2047
sort(table(reefs$material_category), decreasing = TRUE)
#>
#> Module Concrete Vessel Metal Rock Other
#> 2006 1448 572 281 161 80Every deployment FWC publishes is kept, including those whose date is only partly known. The date_precision column records how much of the date FWC captured — "day", "month", "year", "before", or "unknown" — and deploy_date is filled in only for "day". Missing days and months are not invented. See ?reefs for the full column reference.
Tonnage recorded as 0 in the source means “not recorded” and is stored as NA. relief and depth are in feet.
Data source
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Division of Marine Fisheries Management, Artificial Reef Program. Built from layer 12 of the Artificial Reef Locations in Florida feature service, last edited 2026-05-13. The same deployments are also distributed as an Excel list, PDF, shapefile and KML.
The bundled snapshot carries its own vintage:
attr(reefs, "snapshot_date")
#> [1] "2026-05-13"Reef material can move, degrade, or become buried, and some historical positions have never been verified since deployment — see location_accuracy. Acquire the data directly from FWC rather than second-hand if accuracy matters to you.
This package is not affiliated with or endorsed by FWC.