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VegXshiny - An interactive web application for vegetation ecologists

Background

The increasing digitization of research data has motivated data standardization efforts across scientific disciplines. The vegetation science community has recognized the need for a standardized exchange format since at least 2003 and developed the initial version of the Veg-X standard in 2008 (Wiser et al., 2011). Veg-X is implemented as an XML schema that provides both flexibility and precision in representing vegetation data of different origin and format.

Veg-X has not found wide adoption among vegetation ecologists to this date. One of the reasons for this was the lack of tools to easily create Veg-X documents. A major step towards improving the usability of Veg-X was the publication of the VegX R-package (De Cáceres, 2018), which provides tools for importing, integrating and exporting vegetation data using the Veg-X standard. While the VegX package allows users to create Veg-X documents using R programming language, interest in a GUI-based application for Veg-X remained high.

VegXshiny has an intuitive graphical user interface to guide the user through the conversion process

VegXshiny aims to make the conversion of vegetation data into Veg-X documents as easy as possible. The graphical user interface of VegXshiny helps users, who have no experience with programming or markup languages (XML in this case), to build valid Veg-X documents and implement best practices in terms of data management and interoperability. Dynamic import dialogs guide users through the process of mapping their data to the corresponding Veg-X elements, while ensuring that the generated XML conforms to the Veg-X standard. The ability to view and edit input files and output VegX documents gives users full control over their data. Finally, an interactive tree viewer of the Veg-X schema helps making the standard accessible and understandable.

The development of VegXshiny is endorsed by the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS).

References:

Wiser, S.K., Spencer, N., de Cáceres, M., Kleikamp, M., Boyle, B., Peet R.K. (2011): Veg-X – an exchange standard for plot-based vegetation data. – Journal of Vegetation Science 22: 598–609.

De Cáceres (2018): VegX: Vegetation data in Veg-X. R-package, https://iavs-org.github.io/VegX

VegXShiny R package development:

  • Christian König
  • Sebastian Schmidtlein

Veg-X standard development:

  • Miquel De Cáceres
  • Sebastian Schmidtlein
  • Susan K. Wiser
  • Nick Spencer
  • Robert K. Peet
  • Martin Kleikamp
  • Brad Boyle
  • Christian König