rphylopic: An R package for fetching, transforming, and visualising PhyloPic silhouettes

Abstract Data visualisation is vital for data exploration, analysis, and communication in research. Moreover, it can bridge gaps between researchers and the general public by making research findings more accessible and engaging. Today, researchers increasingly conduct their data analyses in programming languages such as R and Python. The availability of data visualisation tools within these environments supports the generation of reproducible data analyses and visualisation workflows. However, resources from external databases are frequently required for data visualisation necessitating integration between these databases and the platforms in which researchers conduct their analyses. Here, we introduce rphylopic, an R package for fetching, transforming, and visualising silhouettes of organisms from the PhyloPic database. In addition to making over 7,000 organism silhouettes available within the R programming language, rphylopic empowers users to modify the appearance of these silhouettes for ultimate customisability when coding production-quality visualisations in both base R and ggplot2 workflows. In this work, we provide details about how the package can be installed, its implementation, and potential use cases. For the latter, we showcase three examples across the ecology and evolutionary biology spectrum. Our hope is that rphylopic will make it easier for biologists to develop more accessible and engaging data visualisations by making external resources readily accessible, customisable, and usable within R. In turn, by integrating into existing workflows, rphylopic helps to ensure that science is reproducible and accessible.