Expansion of a tool to analyze and visualize probabilistic survey data
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Many organizations now use probability-based surveys for measuring the condition of aquatic resources. These include some states and tribes, as well as EPA’s National Aquatic Resource Surveys. The R package ‘spsurvey’ has long been used to analyze the data produced from such surveys. However, the analysis functions are somewhat complicated to use, particularly for someone not very familiar with R. Shiny is an R package that provides a GUI to run R code, such that the user does not need to know how to program in R. We have built an R Shiny application with a web browser interface in order to provide more friendly access to the data analysis functions in the ‘spsurvey’ package and allow the visualization of results in a standardized format. This tool is designed to allow the user to upload a file, select the appropriate variables from their dataset for analysis, select options for analysis, run the analysis, and save the results to an output file. Then user can either use these results or upload a file of results to create standardized graphs of the results. For users that are unfamiliar with R, or just uncomfortable writing R code, this application provides a straightforward interface that makes it easy to run the code to analyze and visualize their probability-based survey data.