mobsim_app - Simulation and visualisation of biodiversity patterns across spatial scales using the mobsim R package

Authors

Katharina Gerstner, Felix May, Dan McGlinn and Alban Sagouis

Description

This is an interactive tool that aims to simulate and visualize multiple biodiversity patterns across spatial scales using the mobsim R-package. A Thomas model is used to simulate point pattern distributions of individual species. Key parameters of the simulation are:

• total number of individuals,
• total number of species,
• the coefficient of variation in the species-abundance distribution that determines the eveness of the abundances,
• spatial aggregation of species.

The tool

1. simulates locations of individuals of different species in a location (plot, area);

2. plots biodiversity patterns such as

   • species-abundance distributions (SAD) using Preston octave plot and rank-abundance curve,
   • spatial distribution of individuals within a unit area,
   • species accummulation curves (SAC), species-area relationships (SAR), and the distance-decay curve.

Run the app on the web

The app is hosted at the following url: https://github.com/AlbanSagouis/mobsim_app forked from https://github.com/MoBiodiv/mobsim_app.

Run the app locally

The app can be run locally. Several R packages are required for locally hosting the app, these can be installed from the R terminal:

install.packages(c("shiny", "shinyBS", "pals", "shinyjs", "devtools", "markdown",
  "mobsim"))

Once those dependencies are installed you can run the app from the R terminal using:

shiny::runGitHub("albansagouis/mobsim_app")

License

GNU GPL

The mobsim package

The underlying mobsim package can be installed from CRAN with install.packages("CRAN") or from GitHub with remotes::install_github("MoBiodiv/mobsim"). mobsim version 0.3.2 or above is needed.