EcoCleanR: Enhancing data quality of biogeographic ranges with application for marine invertebrates

Published distribution data, while invaluable for understanding
species' biogeography, often suffer from limitations such as dated
and static representations of ranges, a bias toward latitudinal
information, and a lack of resolution in sampling frequency and variation
in abundance throughout a species’ distribution. Extensive open-source
biodiversity data now allow us to construct biogeographic ranges with more
modern observations, which can be useful in conservation, evolution, and
ecological studies. However, data quality remains a persistent challenge,
hampering data reliability and usability. We introduce EcoCleanR, an R
package that integrates existing tools with new functionalities to address
data integration and quality assessment through a systematic, step-by-step
approach for marine occurrence data. This package enhances the process of
identifying and resolving common issues in biodiversity data, including
taxonomy and georeferencing errors. It provides: (a) example scripts to
guide users, (b) functionalities to flag problematic occurrence records
from multiple databases, and (c) outputs that include species-specific
distribution ranges and their corresponding environmental conditions, to
facilitate accurate biogeographic and ecological analyses.