The Use of R and R Packages in Biodiversity Conservation Research

Abstract

R is one of the most powerful programming languages for conducting data analysis, modeling, and visualization. Although it is widely utilized in biodiversity conservation research, the comprehensive trends in R and R package usage and patterns in the field still remain unexplored. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of R and R package usage frequencies spanning fifteen years, from 2008 to 2022, encompassing over 24,100 research articles published in eight top biodiversity conservation journals. Within this extensive dataset, 10,220 articles (42.3% of the total) explicitly utilized R for data analysis. The use ratio of R demonstrated a consistent linear growth, escalating from 11.1% in 2008 to an impressive 70.6% in 2022. The ten top utilized R packages were vegan, lme4, MuMIn, nlme, mgcv, raster, MASS, ggplot2, car, and dismo. The frequency of R package utilization varied among journals, underscoring the distinct emphases each journal places on specific focuses of biodiversity conservation research. This analysis highlights the pivotal role of R, with its powerful statistical and data visualization capabilities, in empowering researchers to conduct in-depth analyses and gain comprehensive insights into various dimensions of biodiversity conservation science.