GeoChronR – an R package to model, analyze and visualize age-uncertain paleoscientific data

Abstract. Chronological uncertainty is a hallmark of the paleosciences. While many tools have been made available to researchers to quantify age uncertainties suitable for various settings and assumptions, disparate tools and output formats often discourage integrative approaches. In addition, associated tasks like propagating age model uncertainties to subsequent analyses, and visualizing the results, have received comparatively little attention in the literature and available software. Here we describe GeoChronR, an open-source R package to facilitate these tasks. GeoChronR is built around emerging data standards for the paleosciences (Linked PaleoData, or LiPD), and offers access to four popular age modeling techniques (Bacon, BChron, Oxcal, BAM). The output of these models is used to support ensemble-aware analyses, quantifying the impact of chronological uncertainties on common analyses like age-uncertain correlation, regression, principal component, and spectral analyses. We present five real-world use cases to illustrate how GeoChronR may be used to facilitate these tasks, to visualize the results in intuitive ways, and to store the results for further analysis, promoting transparency and reusability.