ENiRG: R-GRASS interface for efficiently characterizing the ecological niche of species and predicting habitat suitability

Abstract

At the base of species distribution modelling is the ecological niche concept, which describes species' response to distribution of resources. The ecological niche factor analysis, which is implemented in ENiRG, allows to reconstruct species' niche from a set of environmental variables, describing the suitability of the habitat where species occurs. ENiRG overcomes the inefficient management of large volumes of spatial information from wide study areas, high resolution or high number of environmental descriptors. This package also offers the possibility of habitat suitability classification, projection of distributions under different past or future climate scenarios and a GUI to access the functionalities.