occAssess

occAssess assesses potential sampling biases in species occurrence datasets to identify taxonomic, temporal, spatial, and environmental biases prior to ecological inference.

Key Features:

• R package: Implemented as an R package providing functions for bias assessment.
• Bias Detection Functions: Includes discrete functions to identify potential biases across taxonomic, temporal, spatial, and environmental dimensions.
• Temporal Analysis Capability: Allows segmentation of data into specified time periods so each period can be analysed separately to assess temporal changes or trends.
• Visual Outputs: Produces visualizations as ggplot2 objects representing measures of potential bias.

Scientific Applications:

• Data Quality Assessment: Used by ecologists to evaluate the reliability of species occurrence data before conducting inferential analyses.
• Case study on pollinators: Applied to South American datasets for leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae) and hoverflies (Syrphidae) to assess changes in data coverage over time.

Methodology:

Functions compute measures of potential bias across taxonomic, temporal, spatial, and environmental dimensions, optionally segmenting data into specified time periods, and produce ggplot2 objects as visualizations; the package provides measures and visualizations rather than formal recommendations on data suitability.