The study of food webs is very relevant, considering the role these networks have in describing the transfer of energy and matter in the ecosystem (Thompson et al. 2012). As such, the evaluation of the robustness to species extinctions is an important step in any analysis evaluating food web stability. The ...

This blog post presents a beta version of the package to download, process and derive metrics from food web datasets. DISCLAIMER: This is an early release. The code will be subject to improvements with time. Some of this code has been adapted from other sources (e.g. Ecobase website). A ...

Today I’m revisiting an older blog post on our package lconnect, which is available in CRAN (here). If you want to learn about the available connectivity metrics check this post. It is intended to be a very simple approach to derive landscape connectivity metrics. Many of these metrics come ...

A new development version is know available for the package MetaLandSim (v. 1.0.6). It can be downloaded from GitHub. The user has to run the following code in order to install the package from GitHub: library(devtools) install_github(“FMestre1/MetaLandSim”) These changes were required because of recent improvements made to ...

Everyone that authors an R package is curious about how many users download it. As far as I know there’s still no way to get information on all the downloads, from all the R mirrors. Here I’m using package cranlogs, which only gives information on the downloads from ...

The objective of this post is to go into the inner workings of the package MetaLandSim, which I developed a few years ago. MetaLandSim’s main objectives are to i) simulate the occupation of an habitat network suffering some sort of change (but static landscapes work too); ii) simulate range ...

Today we are presenting a new package, lconnect. This package is intended to be a very simple approach to derive landscape connectivity metrics. Many of these metrics come from the interpretation of landscape as graphs. Additionally, it also provides a function to prioritize landscape patches based on their contribution to ...

Answering questions from users is actually a good way to find potentially interesting things to post… With the obvious advantage that other people might find it useful too! So… let’s start… This MetaLandSim user wanted a way to derive the contribution of each individual patch to overall landscape connectivity. ...

MetaLandSim is an R package I’ve developed to simulate metapopulational dynamics on an habitat network. It also computes a lot of landscape connectivity metrics and simulates range expansion (check the manual if you are interested). I’ve mentioned it here frequently, and sometimes I like to post a simple ...

One of these days I got an email about converting MetaLandSim objects to igraph (or the other way around). One of the reasons I did not use igraph in the first place (leading me to develop MetaLandSim) was that I needed my nodes (the vertexes, using igraph nomenclature) to have ...

A new version of MetaLandSim is now available at the CRAN webpage. This update was needed because another package, from which MetaLandSim depends, changed a function used by this package causing it to malfunction.