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

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.fj6q57488](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fj6q57488)

## Description of the data and file structure

We have provided sample data files extracted in April 2025 to demonstrate a case study on the species *Mexacanthina lugubris*, a marine mollusc that inhabits rocky intertidal environments along the Pacific coast. The data sources used for this case study include GBIF, OBIS, iDigBio, and a local database (InvertEbase). The number of occurrence records may vary depending on when the data are extracted.

We created a merged dataset and removed all duplicate records using the EcoCleanR functions `ec_db_merge()` and `ec_rm_duplicate()`, resulting in an output file named **`ecodata.csv`**. All subsequent analyses can be performed using this file, with reproducible results as demonstrated in the package README.

Note: Cells containing `NA` indicate that no value was ...,