virtualspecies

The virtualspecies package is a freely available package for R designed to generate virtual species distributions, a procedure increasingly used in ecology to improve species distribution models. This package provides a framework for integrating the existing methodological approaches with the objective of generating virtual species distributions with increased ecological realism. The package includes (1) generating virtual species’ suitability from a spatial set of environmental conditions, with two different approaches; (2) converting the environmental suitability into presence-absence with a probabilistic approach; (3) introducing dispersal limitations in the realised virtual species distributions and (4) sampling occurrences with different biases in the sampling procedure.