Cover | EcoCleanR: enhancing biogeographic data quality
March Cover
Illustration by Priyanka Soni
Download the high-resolution image
This month’s cover features a schematic illustration of the EcoCleanR workflow, showing the transformation of raw biodiversity data into refined geographic and environmental representations of species distributions.
This cover is done partially on AI (Canva) to make the icons and then most of the work was done on Adobe illustrator by Priyanka Soni.
Read the open access paper in Ecography, by Soni et al. (2026): ‘EcoCleanR’: enhancing data quality of biogeographic ranges with application for marine invertebrates.
From the abstract:
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 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:
Example scripts to guide users
Functionalities to flag problematic occurrence records from multiple databases
Outputs that include species-specific distribution ranges and their corresponding environmental conditions, to facilitate accurate biogeographic and ecological analyses
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