Main menu
... a „Keep It Simple Species Migration model“ for R
What is KISSMig?
KISSMig is a simple, raster-based, stochastic model of species migration for the R-environment. It generates accessibility maps from areas of origin based on suitability maps. The name refers to the KISS principle of software development - also related to the principle of parsimony in scientific modeling - to ensure an easy to use and fast tool for simulations of species migration.
What's the use of it?
Understanding the drivers of species distributions and their dynamics are principal objectives in macroecology and biogeography. Especially the legacy of time-lagged migration in species ranges is important for understanding species distributions. Migration is often neglected in predictions of current, past, or future species distributions. Models which explicitly include migration, on the other hand, can be quite complex and particularly runtime intensive. KISSMig provides an option for a simple integration of limited migration in statistical modeling of species distributions by adding accessibility from geographic origins as additional predictors (Nobis & Normand 2014).
"Fortunately, newly available software packages for generating maps of accessibility from areas of origin now facilitate the testing of how dispersal constraints might influence macro-scale patterns of species distributions and biodiversity." (Kissling et al. 2016)
How to start?
KISSMig is available as a regular R package. Use the download below and install the "kissmig" package in your R environment. KISSMig requires no a-priory knowledge on migration rates, which – due to the runtime behavior – can be optimized within a modeling framework (Nobis & Normand 2014). The only input data are a suitability map and geographic origin of migration. A good starting point is to download and run the script "kissmig_examples.R".