{ReLTER} is an R package that provides access to DEIMS-SDR, allowing to interact with software implemented by eLTER Research Infrastructure (RI) and improving the data/information shared among the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. This package was conceived within eLTER H2020 project and will help advance the development of European Long-Term Ecosystem Research Infrastructures (eLTER RI).

The {ReLTER} package functions in particular allows to:

• retrieve the information about entities (e.g. sites, datasets, and activities) shared by DEIMS-SDR (see e.g. get_site_info function);

• elaborate the information of single site or merge info from national network sites or entire International LTER (ILTER) in order to provide maps, figures, graphs etc (see e.g. get_network_sites, produce_site_map or produce_site_observedProperties_pie functions);

• interact with the ODSEurope managed by members of the Geo-harmonizer project starting with the dataset shared by DEIMS-SDR (see e.g. get_site_ODS function);

• improve the quality of the dataset (see e.g. get_id_worms).

Functions currently implemented are derived from the discussion of the needs declared by eLTER users community.

The {ReLTER} package will follow the progress of eLTER-RI infrastructure and evolve with improvements and development of new tools.

To cite {ReLTER} please use:

Oggioni, A., Silver, M., Tagliolato, P., & Karnieli, A. (2025). ReLTER: An R interface for environmental observation in long term ecological research. Ecological Informatics, 85, 102915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2024.102915

@article{OGGIONI2025102915,
title = {ReLTER: An R interface for environmental observation in long term ecological research},
journal = {Ecological Informatics},
volume = {85},
pages = {102915},
year = {2025},
issn = {1574-9541},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2024.102915},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954124004576},
author = {Alessandro Oggioni and Micha Silver and Paolo Tagliolato and Arnon Karnieli}

or:

Alessandro Oggioni, Micha Silver, Luigi Ranghetti & Paolo Tagliolato. (2026). ReLTER: An Interface for the eLTER Community (v3.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5576813

@software{alessandro_oggioni_2025_5576813,
  author       = {Alessandro Oggioni and Micha Silver and Luigi Ranghetti and Paolo Tagliolato},
  title        = {ReLTER: An Interface for the eLTER Community},
  year         = 2026,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v3.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.5576813},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5576813}
}

Visit the {ReLTER} website at docs.ropensci.org/ReLTER/ for further documentation, examples, and installation of the package.

The manual of {ReLTER} package could be found here.

You can install the main version of {ReLTER} from GitHub with:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ropensci/ReLTER")
library(ReLTER)

If you want to install different package branch (e.g. ‘dev’) can you use this command:

devtools::install_github('https://github.com/ropensci/ReLTER', ref = 'dev')

The {ReLTER} package is part of the R-universe community and it can be installed also use this command:

utils::install.packages("ReLTER", repos = "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev")

Alternatively {ReLTER} can be used in a Docker container.

If you wish to help develop this package, please follow the contributing guidelines.

Alessandro Oggioni https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7997-219X (CNR, Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment - IREA)

Micha Silver https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1128-1325 (Ben Gurion University - BGU)

Luigi Ranghetti https:://orcid.org/0000-0001-6207-5188 (CNR, Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment - IREA)

Paolo Tagliolato https:://orcid.org/0000-0002-0261-313X (CNR, Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment - IREA)

For a exhaustive list of contributors please visit authors page.

This work has been partially funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the H2020 eLTER-Plus project Grant Agreement No. 871128 (DOI: 10.3030/871128) and eLTER EnRich project Grant Agreement No. 101131751 (DOI: 10.3030/101131751)

Thanks to the reviewers and the editor (more about authors) for their work.