StatFaRmer: cultivating insights with an advanced R shiny dashboard for digital phenotyping data analysis

Digital phenotyping is a fast-growing area of hardware and software research and development. Phenotypic studies usually require determining whether there is a difference in some trait between plants with different genotypes or under different conditions. We developed StatFaRmer, a user-friendly tool tailored for analyzing time series of plant phenotypic parameters, ensuring seamless integration with common tasks in phenotypic studies. For maximum versatility across phenotypic methods and platforms, it uses data in the form of a set of spreadsheets (XLSX and CSV files). StatFaRmer is designed to handle measurements that have variation in timestamps between plants and the presence of outliers, which is common in digital phenotyping. Data preparation is automated and well-documented, leading to customizable ANOVA tests that include diagnostics and significance estimation for effects between user-defined groups. Users can download the results from each stage and reproduce their analysis. It was tested and shown to work reliably for large datasets across various experimental designs with a wide range of plants, including bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), durum wheat (Triticum durum), and triticale (× Triticosecale); sugar beet (Beta vulgaris), cocklebur (Xanthium strumarium) and lettuce (Lactuca sativa), corn (Zea mays) and sunflower (Helianthus annuus), and soybean (Glycine max). StatFaRmer is created as an open-source Shiny dashboard, and simple instructions on installation and operation on Windows and Linux are provided.