megaSDM: integrating dispersal and time‐step analyses into species distribution models

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Abstract

Understanding how species ranges shift as climates rapidly change informs us how to effectively conserve vulnerable species. Species distribution models (SDMs) are an important method for examining these range shifts. The tools for performing SDMs are ever improving. Here, we present the megaSDM R package. This package facilitates realistic spatiotemporal SDM analyses by incorporating dispersal probabilities, creating time‐step maps of range change dynamics and efficiently handling large datasets and computationally intensive environmental subsampling techniques. Provided a list of species and environmental data, megaSDM synthesizes GIS processing, subsampling methods, MaxEnt modelling, dispersal rate restrictions and additional statistical tools to create a variety of outputs for each species, time period and climate scenario requested. For each of these, megaSDM generates a series of distribution maps and outputs visual representations of statistical data. megaSDM offers several advantages over other commonly used SDM tools. First, many of the functions in megaSDM natively implement parallelization, enabling the package to handle large amounts of data efficiently without the need for additional coding. megaSDM also implements environmental subsampling of occurrences, making the technique broadly available in a way that was not possible before due to computational considerations. Uniquely, megaSDM generates maps showing the expansion and contraction of a species range across all considered time periods (time‐maps), and constrains both presence/absence and continuous suitability maps of species ranges according to species‐specific dispersal constraints. The user can then directly compare non‐dispersal and dispersal‐limited distribution predictions. This paper discusses the unique features and highlights of megaSDM, describes the structure of the package and demonstrates the package's features and the model flow through examples.

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