OCCUR Shiny application: A user‐friendly guide for curating species occurrence records

Abstract

Abstract Ecology increasingly relies on a massive volume of biodiversity occurrence records to draw insights into large‐scale biogeographical, ecological and evolutionary phenomena. This often involves defining a set of criteria that guides the collection, filtering and standardising of available records. These curation processes are often neither described in detail nor well documented. This hampers the comparability and reproducibility of studies and thus undermines the robustness of any ecological result. Yet, to date, there is no guide providing a friendly way to reason and document a complete data curation process. We reviewed the available literature on data curation, including tools such as R packages and workflows. From this assessment, we created a complete guide organised into five modules that allows users to consciously select and validate occurrence records based on these curation criteria. This is presented in the user‐friendly Shiny R OCCUR application, available at https://ecoinformatic.shinyapps.io/OCCUR/. OCCUR application provides a guide for researchers to deal with the trade‐off between data certainty and coverage generated in each data curation step. An interactive graph of these changes is provided within each module. OCCUR also produces a custom‐made final report including all steps used for data filtering. This report helps to streamline the writing of the methods section of manuscripts and technical reports, thus promoting the reproducibility of data curation processes. This Shiny application provides an interactive overview of the data curation methods and their use for handling occurrence records from public repositories. It brings together the taxonomic, temporal and spatial dimensions of data and also the identification of duplicates of the records. OCCUR can be applied for multiple purposes, such as teaching R to ecologists or enhancing reproducibility of macroecology and biogeography.