coralquiz: A Shiny app for coral identification practice and quizzes
Year: 2025
Type: software
Abstract: coralquiz is an R package that launches a Shiny application for practising and testing coral identification using flashcard style image prompts. The app is aimed at students, researchers, and monitoring programmes who need a simple, reproducible way to build and assess coral ID skills using curated image sets or their own photographs. This release archives the source code for the coralquiz R package and provides a stable, citable version for use in teaching and research. The app supports two main modes: Practice mode Ungraded training with a large image and four answer options, providing instant feedback and unlimited questions. Quiz mode A graded quiz with a fixed number of questions and a final score summary. Quiz runs can optionally be written to CSV to track performance for individuals or classes. The package includes access to online image sets for Caribbean reefs, such as caribbean_benthos (benthic photo quadrats including corals, macroalgae, sponges and other substrata) and caribbean_corals (closer views focused on coral taxa). Images are hosted in a separate repository so that the R package remains lightweight. An internet connection is required to use these bundled sources. Users can also supply their own photographs via a simple folder structure on disk (photos_root / location / species / image_files). Species folder names become the labels shown in the app. Supported file types are jpg, jpeg, png, and webp, and each source should contain at least four species. App launch and usage After installing the package, the application is launched in R by loading coralquiz and calling either the practice() or quiz() functions. For standard use with the bundled online image sets, users can run: coralquiz::practice("caribbean_benthos") coralquiz::quiz("caribbean_benthos", n = 20) Please remember to press stop in your R console after finishing, or in between different sources/modes. To work with local images, the same functions are called with an additional photos_root argument that points to the directory containing the location/species/image folder structure. This release may also include a small helper script (for example launch_coralquiz.R) which, when sourced in R, installs coralquiz if needed and opens the Shiny app in practice mode. Contact For any queries regarding species identifications, or if you would like your own photo sets to be considered for inclusion in future image sources, please contact Matthew Doherty at [email protected].
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7108201312