steps: Software for spatially and temporally explicit population simulations

C Visintin; NJ Briscoe; SNC Woolley; PE Lentini; R Tingley; BA Wintle; N Golding

Journal article

steps: Software for spatially and temporally explicit population simulations

C Visintin, NJ Briscoe, SNC Woolley, PE Lentini, R Tingley, BA Wintle, N Golding

Methods in Ecology and Evolution | WILEY | Published : 2020

DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.13354

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Abstract

Species population dynamics are driven by spatial and temporal changes in the environment, anthropogenic activities and conservation management actions. Understanding how populations will change in response to these drivers is fundamental to a wide range of ecological applications, but there are few open-source software options accessible to researchers and managers that allow them to predict these changes in a flexible and transparent way. We introduce an open-source, multi-platform r package, steps, that models spatial changes in species populations as a function of drivers of distribution and abundance, such as climate, disturbance, landscape dynamics and species ecological and physiologi..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Natalie Briscoe Author

Skipton Woolley Author

Pia Lentini Author

Brendan Wintle Author

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

We thank Will Morris and John Baumgartner for their contributions towards developing early prototypes and modules of the software, Gerry Ryan for testing and providing feedback on the software, Craig Nitschke for sharing the landis model, and Barry Brook and one other anonymous reviewer for providing insightful comments on the software and manuscript. This work was supported by The University of Melbourne's Computational Biology Research Initiative - awarded to N.J.B., P.E.L., R.T. and N.G., the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Threatened Species Recovery Hub, and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT100100819) - awarded to B.A.W.; R.T. and N.G. were partially funded by ARC DECRA fellowships (DE170100601 and DE180100635). N.J.B. was supported by an ARC Discovery project (DP180101852), P.E.L. was supported by an ARC Linkage project (LP160100439) and S.N.C.W. was supported by the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative funded by the International Climate Initiative (IKI).