ggPlantmap: an R package for the graphic mapping of plant images.

Summary The development of single-cell techniques revolutionized the field of plant biology. It enabled the characterization of cell-specific events in a wide range of species and allowed us to gain novel insights of minute biological processes occurring in complex plant tissues (Cuperus, 2022; Libault et al., 2017). Such novel approach is greatly improving our understanding of plant development, evolution, and physiology. As these techniques gain more attention within the plant research community, there is a rising need for the development of specialized visualization tools that can effectively explore the rich and complex data they produce. ggPlantmap is an open-source R package with the goal of facilitating the generation of informative ggplot maps from plant images to explore quantitative cell type-specific data. When combined with external quantitative data, ggPlantmap can be used for the visualization and displaying of spatial profiles in distinct parts/cells of the plant (Figure 1). The conceptual workflow is like other ggplot based geographic map packages, such as ggmap (Kahle and Wickham, 2013).