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The virtualspecies R package
This package provides a user-friendly framework for generating virtual species distribution, integrating the existing methodological approaches. The package includes (1) generating virtual species’ suitability from a spatial set of environmental conditions, with two different approaches; (2) converting the environmental suitability into presence-absence with a probabilistic approach; (3) introducing dispersal limitations in the realised virtual species distributions and (4) sampling occurrences with different biases in the sampling procedure.
There is a full online tutorial available here: http://borisleroy.com/virtualspecies/
virtualspecies has been updated to version 1.6 in September 2023. The major
change in this update is that now this package relies upon the R package
terra rather than raster; in addition, internally it uses functions from
the package sf rather than sp. This update was required since multiple
spatial packages are going to be retired from R, and future developments and
improvements of spatial packages will rely on terra and sf.
This update may cause some breaking changes. I maintained the changes as
minimal as possible so that previous code (version <= 1.5) will still be
compatible with the new code (version >= 1.6). However, objects generated
in versions <= 1.5 will likely not be compatible with the package version 1.6.
They can still be converted manually to become compatible, using functions
from the package terra such as rast(). If you find yourself
in trouble, email me about that. In addition, the methods in functions
limitDistribution() and sampleOccurrences() have changed slightly because
they now use the package rnaturaleath (formerly they used rworldmap).