Ecological niche modeling (ENM) workflows were first developed in terrestrial systems and typically organize data based on horizontal coordinates. Critically for marine species, pelagic environmental conditions may change strikingly with depth, leading to poorly trained ENMs and inaccurate estimates of species distributions when using customary methods. To solve this problem, we created voluModel to help generate ENMs calibrated by sampling environmental data in three dimensions. The package is accompanied by extensive, open-access tutorials.
Oceans, seas and watersAddressing target audiences and expressing needs
- Help in technical expertise
- Collaboration
- Fellowship to advance my/our research
We are looking for collaborators interested in contributing to the ongoing development of the package to make it more broadly useful to the marine biogeography community. We are also looking for those with expertise in thin-plate spline and other mehtods of extrapolation to improve the extrapolation and smoothing aspects of the package and hopefully incorporate a more three-dimensional approach. We are also interested in fellowship support to continue the development of the package, especially developing methods of facilitating more complex ecological niche modeling algorithms.
- Academia/ Universities
R&D, Technology and Innovation aspects
The package is available through CRAN. We are writing a software note to more broadly publicize the package. voluModel development is ongoing; future versions may include functions for facilitating the use of particular ENM algorithms (e.g., Maxent), tools for estimating additional extrapolation measures (e.g., Most Dissimilar Variable, Extrapolation Detection, Movement-Oriented Parity), and other features requested by users.
The package is open-source and has extensive documentation to lower the bar to entry and expand the user base. The development version of the package is in a public repository on GitHub, and allows users to post Issues and contributors to submit pull requests to facilitate ongoing, interactive, and collaborative development.
This is an open source piece of software.
By maintaining the package as open source with a public and accessible model of contribution, we anticipate the continued growth and development of voluModel beyond the life of the grant during which it was developed. GitHub is a free service with stable links to resources.
