About WEGAN

WEGAN (Web-based Ecological Group Analysis) is a free, browser-based platform designed to make community ecology analysis more accessible to a wide range of users. Developed by researchers at the University of Alberta, it was created to fill a long-standing gap in ecological research tools. While powerful packages like vegan are widely used, they require substantial programming skills and local installation. WEGAN provides these same advanced functions through an intuitive point-and-click interface, removing technical barriers and enabling students, educators, and researchers with minimal coding experience to perform sophisticated community ecology analyses.

At its core, WEGAN is designed to handle the complexity and high dimensionality of ecological community datasets, which often consist of numerous species influenced by different environmental variables. The platform streamlines analysis through eight interactive modules: 1) Clustering and Classification, 2) Correlation, 3) Dispersal, 4) Diversity, 5) Ordination, 6) Plotting, 7) Statistics, and 8) Taxonomy. Users can upload community abundance, environmental, trait, and taxonomic data, run analyses, and generate publication-quality figures and tables without writing code. Each session also produces a complete R command history that can be downloaded and re-run in a WEGAN’s Docker environment (which can be downloaded an installed separately), allowing analyses to be reproduced locally. This feature helps students transition from GUI-based to script-based workflows.

WEGAN’s design emphasizes usability and reproducibility. It is implemented with a Java-based interface and an R backend, hosted on a cloud platform, and released as open-source software. To support learning and adoption, it includes extensive Tutorials, built-in example datasets, and a FAQ Section. The interface allows interactive visualization, data integrity checks, missing value imputation, rare taxa filtering, and a wide range of normalization options before analysis. Results can be exported in multiple image and data formats, customized for color, resolution, and size.

Ultimately, WEGAN was developed to democratize community ecology analysis. It enables newcomers and experts alike to explore patterns of species diversity, dispersal, taxonomy, and environmental relationships using both traditional statistical and modern machine-learning methods. By lowering the technical barrier to entry, WEGAN promotes best practices in ecological data analysis and has strong potential as a teaching tool in ecology, metagenomics, and microbiomics courses.

WEGAN version 1.0 is currently updated and maintained by the Wishart Lab at the University of Alberta.

Citing WEGAN

Sykes GP, Normington L, Poelzer J, Zhao S, Allen D, Stuart S, Oler E, Jot K, Gautam V, Zhao X, Xia J, Jickling GC and Wishart DS (2025) WEGAN: a web-based community ecology platform. Front. Ecol. Evol. 13:1604480. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2025.1604480

Software Comparison

Implementation:

WEGAN was implemented using PrimeFaces library (v6.1) based on JavaServer Faces Technology. The majority of the backend computations and visualization are carried out by functions written in R (v4.0.5). Communication between Java and R is established through TCP/IP using the Rserve program.

Software License:

"This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the 
GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of 
the License, or (at your option) any later version.See the
GNU General Public License for more details."