‘metrix’: An R package for assessing the biological quality of water

Abstract

The monitoring of biological indicators is necessary to evaluate water quality. Macroinvertebrate-based biomonitoring tools, such as simple metrics and biotic indices, are widely used to assess biological water quality. However, the growing availability of ecological data has not been accompanied by the development of processing tools that can facilitate data handling and analysis. These analyses, although not mathematically complex, can be prone to errors, especially when dealing with large databases. To address this issue, we introduce ‘metrix’, a free and open-source R package for the calculation of metrics and biotic indices for macroinvertebrate samples. This package provides a straightforward method for data manipulation, as it relies on preset spreadsheets. It does not require the use of other software or packages and can be easily modified, making it suitable for non-programming users.