shinyssdtools: A web application for fitting Species Sensitivity Distributions (SSDs)

Abstract

The species sensitivity distribution (SSD) is the most widely used method for getting water quality benchmarks to characterize effects of chemical contaminants for water quality or ecological risk assessment (Fox et al., 2020). This typically involves estimating the concentration of a chemical that affects 5% of the species considered (Posthuma et al., 2001). The ssdtools R package (Thorley & Schwarz, 2018) has recently advanced SSD methods by providing model averaging using information-theoretic criteria and the construction of confidence intervals using bootstrapping (Fox et al., 2020). shinyssdtools is a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) to the ssdtools R package. shinyssdtools, which was developed in the Shiny web framework (Chang et al., 2020), is an R package in its own right. As well as providing access to the core functionality in ssdtools, it also offers the following value-added features: a bilingual (English/French) interface, customization and downloads of plots and tables and generation of R scripts for reproducibility. shinyssdtools can be accessed from the web or it can be run locally by installing the R package.