A Web App for the Animal Culture Database and a Template for Deploying Comparative Trait Databases With Shiny

There is a large and growing number of trait databases in ecology and evolution. Structured and open-access data repositories are important resources for allowing researchers to explore, visualize, and download such data for analysis. In this paper, we detail the design and structure of a simple Shiny web app intended to deploy trait databases as interactive web platforms. Using the Animal Culture Database (ACDB) as a case study, we highlight the web app's functionality and potential transversal applications for research and deploying other databases. The ACDB is a resource compiling socially transmitted traditions across the animal tree of life. It integrates multiple linked tables with explicit geospatial information, enabling data visualization and analysis of cultural behaviors across diverse taxa. The web app, accessible at https://datadiversitylab.github.io/ACDB/, provides users with an intuitive interface to explore the latest version of the database, including population-level data, behavioral descriptions, and geographic distributions. The code to deploy this web app, and a simplified version to deploy a basic template version, are available on the GitHub repositories https://github.com/datadiversitylab/ACDB and https://github.com/datadiversitylab/generic_shiny_data respectively.