Tutorial on downloading and using FISHGLOB datasets to understand biotic homogenization in R.
Written by
Malin L. Pinsky
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of California Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA, USA
for the
FISHGLOB Symposium on Understanding Marine Ecological Change with Long-term Monitoring and International Cooperation
December 10, 2025
Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg (HIFMB)
Oldenburg, Germany
Based on the analysis in
Kitchel ZJ, Maureaud AA, Fredston A, Shackell N, Mérigot B, Thorson JT, Pécuchet L, Palacios-Abrantes J, Palomares MLD, Acón AE, Belchier M, Bono G, Carbonara P, Collins MA, Cubillos LA, Fairweather TP, Follesa MC, Ruiz CG, Farriols Garau MT, Garofalo G, Isajlović I, Kathena JN, Koen-Alonso M, Maiorano P, Manfredi C, Mifsud J, O’Driscoll RL, Sbrana M, Sólmundsson J, Spedicato MT, Stephenson F, Werner K-M, Yepsen DV, Zupa W, Pinsky ML (2025) Marine communities do not follow the paradigm of increasing similarity through time. PLOS Climate, 4(7):e0000659. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000659
Requirements: This tutorial assumes that you have a computer with an internet connection and with R and RStudio installed.
- Visit https://github.com/ds4eeb/BioticHomogenization (you're here already!)
- Click the green “Code” button, then select “Download ZIP” from the menu that appears.
- Find the downloaded BioticHomogenization-main.zip file on your computer.
- Double click to unzip it (or otherwise unzip it… this might depend on your operating system)
- Open the folder that was created (“BioticHomogenization-main”)
- Open the BioticHomogenization.Rproj by double clicking it. This will open RStudio.
- From within RStudio, open tutorial.Rmd from the Files pane (usually in the lower right corner).
- Read the tutorial and follow the instructions 🙂
Hooray!
If you’re not familiar enough with RStudio to do this, please call an instructor over and we’ll be happy to help!