AUTHOR=Spielman Stephanie J. , Moore Eli K. 

TITLE=dragon: A New Tool for Exploring Redox Evolution Preserved in the Mineral Record

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Earth Science

VOLUME=8

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2020.585087

DOI=10.3389/feart.2020.585087

ISSN=2296-6463

ABSTRACT=<p>The flow of energy and elements between the geosphere and biosphere can be traced through changing redox chemistry of Earth’s surface. Deep-time trends in the mineral record, including mineral age and elemental composition, reveal a dynamic history of changing redox states and chemical speciation. We present a user-friendly exploratory network analysis platform called dragon (Deep-time Redox Analysis of the Geobiology Ontology Network) to facilitate investigation of the expanding redox chemical network preserved in the mineral record throughout Earth’s history and beyond. Given a user-indicated focal element or set of focal elements, dragon constructs interactive bipartite networks of minerals and their constituent elements over a specified range in geologic-time using information from the Mineral Evolution Database (<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://rruff.info/evolution/" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://rruff.info/evolution/</ext-link>). Written in the open-source language R as a Shiny application, dragon launches a browser-based dashboard to explore mineral evolution in deep-time. We demonstrate dragon’s utility through examining the mineral chemistry of lithium over deep-time. dragon is freely available from CRAN under a GPL-3 License, with source code and documentation hosted at <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://github.com/sjspielman/dragon" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/sjspielman/dragon</ext-link>.</p>