Systematic review of free and open source software (FOSS) employed in ecomorphological studies with recommendations for user-friendly developments

Abstract

Morphometrics is an important aspect of biological research that integrates in various ways with other branches of biology like genetics, ecology, and evolution to determine an organism's form and function. It is one of the most frequently used methods to study ecomorphology (the interaction of morphological features of organisms with environmental variables). In recent years, research in the field of morphometrics has achieved revolutionary developments from studying simple morphological variations to visualizing shape differences, thanks to free and open source software (FOSS). These FOSS not only incorporate various steps of morphometric methods such as image processing, digitization, data acquisition and statistical analyses but also help in determining the influence of ecological factors on an organism's morphology. In this article, we discussed the applications, benefits, and drawbacks of FOSS frequently employed in current ecomorphological studies. We observed that in many morphological studies, the integration of ecological data is completely missing, which is a prerequisite in determining the influential factors influencing an organism's morphology. We believe that the main reason behind the lack of integration of ecological information in these studies is the dearth of proper knowledge about the usage of presently available FOSS. To move forward, we, therefore, propose software developers to design user-friendly FOSS which will be compatible with all operating systems and can integrate all maneuvers of ecomorphological methods with common data file formats. This will help researchers to employ an ecomorphological approach to resolve various questions in biological research.