About The Barefoot Ecologist’s Toolbox

The concept of the Barefoot Ecologist’s Toolbox originated with Jeremy Prince’s work in the early 2000s (Prince, 2003).

The idea for the website itself grew out of the length-based spawning potential ratio (LBSPR) work (Prince et al. 2015; Hordyk et al. 2015a, b, and Hordyk et al. 2016) which highlighted the importance of assessment models for data-limited fisheries that were robust and reliable while straight-forward to understand and implement.

The website was originally developed by Adrian Hordyk and Jeremy Prince. Jason Cope developed the Shiny application estimating the natural mortality rate, and has become an important contributor to the site.

Neil Loneragan has been an important collaborator in the development of the concept for the website, as well as the development of the LBSPR approach, and the web-based applications that are based on it.

Collaboration

We hope that The Barefoot Ecologist’s Toolbox can become a central hub for applications and information relating to the assessment and management of data-limited fisheries, and welcome anyone who is interested in collaborating or contributing to the site to contact us either through email or through GitHub.

If you’ve developed a fisheries-related Shiny application, we’d love to include it on the site!

Acknowledgements

We’d like to acknowledge the support of Murdoch University, and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation for the development and maintenance of this website.

The LBSPR Shiny application is based on an earlier PHP-based version that was developed as part of the USAID IMACS project. Their support is gratefully acknowledged.

About the Site

This site is built with a collection of open-source software packages, and is only possible due to the generosity and hardwork of many people and organisations.

The site is freely hosted with GitHub Pages and is powered by Jekyll, the open-source static site generator.

The theme is Minimal Mistakes, a highly flexible Jekyll theme developed and generously shared by Michael Rose

The applications have been built using Shiny a R package developed, maintained, and freely shared by RStudio.

Of course, the Shiny apps themselves run in R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

Many thanks to all involved in developing and maintaining these fantastic resources. And a big shout-out to the R and the Shiny communities, particularly on StackOverflow (R and Shiny), whose collective efforts ensure that creative solutions are shared or invented for every imaginable problem.