Verónica Cruz-Alonso, Christoph Pucher, Sophia Ratcliffe, Paloma Ruiz-Benito, Julen Astigarraga, Mathias Neumann, Hubert Hasenauer, Francisco Rodríguez-Sánchez

In recent decades there has been an increasing demand by ecologists for harmonized climatic data at large spatial scales and spanning long periods. Here we present easyclimate, a software package to obtain daily climatic data at high resolution (0.0083º, ~1 km) with R. The package facilitates the downloading and processing of precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures for Europe from 1950 to 2020. Using easyclimate and given a set of coordinates (points or polygons) and dates (days or years), the user can download the climatic information as a tidy table or a raster object. In this package we implemented Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs which provide access to daily climate data for thousands of sites/days within minutes, without having to download huge rasters. Daily climate data are not available in many of the current climate databases and are essential for many ecological research questions and applications, including the study of the effects of extreme climatic events related to late-spring frosts, heat waves, or dry periods on plant performance. easyclimate taps the potential for climatic data and enables multiple applications in forestry, ecological and vegetation studies across Europe.