Content area

Abstract

Large-scale ecological sampling can be difficult and costly, especially for organisms that are too small to be easily identified in a natural environment by eye. Typically, these microscopic floral and fauna are sampled by collecting substrates from nature and then separating organisms from substrates in the laboratory. In many cases, diverse organisms can be identified to the species-level using molecular barcodes. To facilitate large-scale ecological sampling of microscopic organisms, we used a geographic data-collection platform for mobile devices called Fulcrum that streamlines the organization of geospatial sampling data, substrate photographs, and environmental data at natural sampling sites. These sampling data are then linked to organism isolation data from the laboratory. Here, we describe the easyFulcrum R package, which can be used to clean, process, and visualize ecological field sampling and isolation data exported from the Fulcrum mobile application. We developed this package for wild nematode sampling, but it can be used with other organisms. The advantages of using Fulcrum combined with easyFulcrum are (1) the elimination of transcription errors by replacing manual data entry and/or spreadsheets with a mobile application, (2) the ability to clean, process, and visualize sampling data using a standardized set of functions in the R software environment, and (3) the ability to join disparate data to each other, including environmental data from the field and the molecularly defined identities of individual specimens isolated from samples.

Details

1009240
Business indexing term
Company / organization
Title
easyFulcrum: An R package to process and analyze ecological sampling data generated using the Fulcrum mobile application
Publication title
PLoS One; San Francisco
Volume
16
Issue
10
First page
e0254293
Publication year
2021
Publication date
Oct 2021
Section
Research Article
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Place of publication
San Francisco
Country of publication
United States
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Milestone dates
2021-06-07 (Received); 2021-09-21 (Accepted); 2021-10-06 (Published)
ProQuest document ID
2579572130
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/easyfulcrum-r-package-process-analyze-ecological/docview/2579572130/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2021 Di Bernardo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-06-30
Database
ProQuest One Academic