PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Timothée Poisot
AU  - Benjamin Baiser
AU  - Jennifer A. Dunne
AU  - Sonia Kéfi
AU  - François Massol
AU  - Nicolas Mouquet
AU  - Tamara N. Romanuk
AU  - Daniel B. Stouffer
AU  - Spencer A. Wood
AU  - Dominique Gravel
TI  - <kbd>mangal</kbd> - making ecological network analysis simple
AID  - 10.1101/002634
DP  - 2015 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 002634
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/24/002634.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/24/002634.full
AB  - The study of ecological networks is severely limited by (i) the difficulty to access data, (ii) the lack of a standardized way to link meta-data with interactions, and (iii) the disparity of formats in which ecological networks themselves are represented. To overcome these limitations, we conceived a data specification for ecological networks. We implemented a database respecting this standard, and released a R package (rmangal) allowing users to programmatically access, curate, and deposit data on ecological interactions. In this article, we show how these tools, in conjunctions with other frameworks for the programmatic manipulation of open ecological data, streamlines the analysis process, and improves eplicability and reproducibility of ecological networks studies.