New ecospace R package for simulating community assembly and ecological diversification using ecospace frameworks

R Package for Simulating Community Assembly and Ecological Diversification Using Ecospace Frameworks

ecospace is an R package that implements stochastic simulations of community assembly (ecological diversification) using customizable ecospace frameworks (functional trait spaces). Simulations model the 'neutral', 'redundancy', 'partitioning", and "expansion" models of Bush and Novack-Gottshall (2012) as implemented in Novack-gottshall (In pressA,B). The package provides a wrapper to calculate common ecological disparity and functional diversity statistical dynamics as a function of species richness. Functions are written so they will work in a parallel-computing environment.

The package also contains a sample data set, functional traits for Late Ordovician (Type Cincinnatian) fossil species from the Kope and Waynesville formations.

References

Bush, A. and P.M. Novack-Gottshall. 2012. Modelling the ecological-functional diversification of marine Metazoa on geological time scales. Biology Letters 8: 151-155.

Contact Phil Novack-Gottshall ([email protected]) for a pre-print of the following articles in review, which provide more information on the package and its utility.

Novack-Gottshall, P.M. In review at Paleobiology (submitted Oct. 5, 2015). General models of ecological diversification. I. Conceptual synthesis.

Novack-Gottshall, P.M. In review at Paleobiology (submitted Oct. 5, 2015). General models of ecological diversification. II. Simulations and empirical applications.

Further information

Further information is available at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ecospace/

Development versions will be posted to https://github.com/pnovack-gottshall/ecospace

This code is authored by Phil Novack-Gottshall and offered under CC0.