‘RISDM‘: species distribution modelling from multiple data sources in R

Abstract

Species distribution models (SDMs) are usually based on a single data type, such as presence-only (PO), presence-absence (PA) or abundance (AA). Results from SDMs using single sources of data will suffer from inherent biases and limitations to that data type. For example, PO data contain sampling-bias and PA/AA data are often less expansive and more sparse. Integrated SDMs (ISDMs) combine multiple data types and have recently emerged as a way to leverage strengths and minimise weaknesses of the different data types. They pose a common (distribution) model and separate observation models for each of the data types. The ‘RISDM' package for the R environment (www.r-project.org) provides access to this modelling framework using functions for preparation, fitting, interpreting and diagnosing models. The functionality of the package is demonstrated here using synthetic data sets.