expowo: An R package for mining global plant diversity and distribution data

Area of Science:

• Biodiversity informatics
• Plant taxonomy
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Online biodiversity databases like Plants of the World Online (POWO) are growing rapidly.
• Accessing and processing this vast amount of plant data requires advanced bioinformatic tools.
• Existing tools may not adequately cater to users with limited R programming expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce expowo, an open-source R package designed for extracting and utilizing botanical data from POWO.
• To provide bioinformatic tools that facilitate the processing of massive biodiversity data for scientific applications.
• To make botanical data more accessible to researchers with varying levels of R programming proficiency.

Main Methods:

• The expowo package is implemented in R and covers the entire vascular plant tree of life.
• It offers functions to extract taxonomic and distributional data for plant families, genera, and species.
• Outputs include species lists, original publications, synonyms, distributions, species richness maps, and discovery curves.

Main Results:

• Expowo can generate comprehensive lists of species within any plant family, including synonyms and distribution data.
• The package produces global maps of species richness and visualizations of species-discovery accumulation and nomenclatural changes.
• Empirical examples demonstrate the package's utility with biodiverse countries and important angiosperm families.

Conclusions:

• Expowo empowers users, even those with limited R programming skills, to efficiently extract specific botanical information from online databases.
• The package aids in the interpretation of biogeographic and taxonomic patterns through generated maps and graphics.
• Expowo enhances the accessibility and usability of large-scale botanical data for scientific research.