deranged

[R PACKAGE] Modeling software for mechanistic species range simulations.

To understand how species' geographic ranges shift in response to forces like climate change, we need to model the underlying mechanistic processes like population demography and dispersal. I am the lead developer for the R software package “deranged” (for “DEmographic RANGE modeling with Dispersal”), which provides a flexible set of open source tools for efficiently simulating species range dynamics for a wide range of different applications. This software also underpins parts of my own empirical research focusing on climate impacts on forests.

The package is centered around a demography module that uses a Markov population matrix model to simulate local age- or stage-based population dynamics through time as a function of environmental variation, and an interacting dispersal module that simulates movement among grid cells. Discrete stochastic dynamics and continuous deterministic dynamics are both supported.

The project lives here on GitHub. Development is ongoing, and additional features and API changes will be added over time.