Introduction


FLARES is an online, open-source software for free-list analyses.

FLARES was developed to overcome some of the limitations of its direct ancestor FLAME which is a set of VBA macros running under Microsoft Excel (Pennec et al., 2012).

While maintaining the same philosophy - making free-list analysis as user-friendly as possible - FLARES offers:

  • An extended accessibility. Web-based, you just need a web-browser and you can access FLARES from any operating system.
  • Regular updates. Users are always sure to work with the latest version of FLARES as the application is regularly updated on the server.
  • Integrated statistical analyses. While FLAME required the use of third-party software to conduct exploratory and multivariate analyses, the latter have been directly integrated into FLARES through the use of existing R packages (listed in the 'About' sub-tab).
  • A user-friendly and interactive interface. The use of rStudio's shiny package allows for an interactive interface allowing user's to generate tables and aesthetic plots without ever modifying their original data.

Please visit the other sub-tabs of this 'Introduction' to learn more about FLARES and how to use it.

If you are familiar with R and rStudio you may run FLARES locally on your computer by forking the application on GitHub.


The development of FLARES has been made possible through the support of:

FLARES' development was finalized in 2017 while the main author was funded by a post-doctoral grant awarded by the FYSSEN Foundation.

The idea of developing FLARES sprang within the international research program PIAF (Interdisciplinary Program on indigenous indicators of Fauna and Flora) during which large datasets of free-lists were collected in four different countries (Cameroon, France, USA and Zimbabwe).


Upload file containing free lists

Normalization and Categorization









Free-List Analyses


Download Free-List Results Table



Respondent Analyses





Copyright (C) 2017 Jean Wencélius - GNU License - AGPLv3