CSR Calculator: An R package and Shiny application for assigning plant ecological strategies using trait data

Abstract

1. The competitor, stress-tolerator, ruderal (CSR) theory, first proposed by John Philip Grime, is a useful framework for understanding plant ecological strategies and predicting responses to environmental changes and pressures. However, current tools for assigning CSR strategies are limited to an Excel sheet format and have yet to be integrated into modern computational platforms that enable reproducible research. 2. We present CSRcalculator (https://github.com/TeddyGaskin/CSRcalculator), an open-source R package and shiny application that calculates CSR scores and assigns strategies based on user-uploaded trait data. CSRcalculator supports CSR assignments according to the three most prominent models: The original soft approach, the global StrateFy, and a morpho-physiological model. 3. The R package outputs a table including CSR scores, assigned strategies and intermediate traits for the selected model. The shiny application produces this same table alongside an interactive ternary plot to visualise the strategy distribution and an optional summary table describing the overall CSR strategy distribution, using metrics such as, the modal strategy, axis means, standard deviations, and ranges. Group-level analyses calculate the same statistics across user-defined categories. 4. We provide a worked example using our tool to assign CSR strategies to plants for an example dataset.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の形態・生理形質データからCSRスコアと生態戦略を算出するRパッケージ／Shinyアプリの開発であり、再現可能な形質解析ツールが研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The paper's computational analysis is implemented in the authors' publicly available CSRcalculator R package and Shiny application, both with explicit GitHub URLs, plus a hosted web app. The adapted Novakovskiy et al. (2021) trait dataset is bundled in the package.