Analysing global economic costs of invasive alien species with the invacost R package

AimLarge-scale datasets are becoming increasingly available for macroecological research from different disciplines. However, learning their specific extraction and analytical requirements can become prohibitively time-consuming for researchers. We argue that this issue can be tackled with the provision of methodological frameworks published in open-source software. We illustrate this solution with the invacost R package, an open-source software designed to query and analyse the global database on reported economic costs of invasive alien species, InvaCost. InnovationsFirst, the invacost package provides updates of this dynamic database directly in the analytical environment R. Second, it helps understand the nature of economic cost data for invasive species, their harmonisation process, and the inherent biases associated with such data. Third, it readily provides complementary methods to query and analyse the costs of invasive species at the global scale, all the while accounting for econometric statistical issues. Main conclusionsThis tool will be useful for scientists working on invasive alien species, by (i) facilitating access and use to this multi-disciplinary data resource and (ii) providing a standard procedure which will facilitate reproducibility and comparability of studies, one of the major critics of this topic until now. We discuss how the development of this R package was designed as an enforcement of general recommendations for transparency, reproducibility and comparability of science in the era of big data in ecology.