Species range maps in R

Background

In biodiversity science, understanding distributions of species is very important. Range maps are simple representations of where a species can be found. (e.g MoL1, MoL2, IUCN1) These range maps have numerous applications in analysis of biodiversity data. There are various approaches to generate these range maps (Ref). Since R is being used widely in biodiversity research, it will be handy to have a toolbox to making and analysing species range maps using various methods.

Related work

There are R packages to fetch biodiversity occurrence data (spocc, rgbif), manipulate spatial data but a toolbox specializing in range maps related functionality would be handy to generate and display these maps.

Details of your coding project

Simple methods to generate species range maps using occurrence points i.e. convex hull, concave hull etc.
Generate range maps using spatial polygons from a shapefile i.e. group of states or districts
Generating range maps using output of species distribution models
Improving precision and aesthetics of the range maps using clipping and buffering
Quick and simple functions to display the range maps to display the generated range map on world map and an option to display it zoomed to a bounding box.
Generate presence-absence matrix (PAM) using these range maps for a given spatial extent and for a user requested spatial resolution

Expected impact

R is increasingly being used in biodiversity science. Maps are one of the important components of understanding biodiversity data. This toolbox will help manage basic map making related tasks which are otherwise needed to be done in specialized GIS software like qgis. There will be advantage in terms of generating multiple maps by scripting rather than generating each one by hand.

Mentors

Students, please contact mentors below after completing at least one of the tests below.

Narayani Barve [email protected] is a biodiversity informatics scientist and was a GSoC student (2015) as well as mentor (2016-2017), has developed a package ENMGadgets. Has extensive experience working with spatial information.
Vijay Barve [email protected] is a biodiversity data scientist and has contributed to several R packages related to biodiversity i.e. rgbif, rvertnet, rinat, bdvis and so on. Has been involved with GSoC and R since 2012.

Tests

Students, please do one or more of the following tests before contacting the mentors above.

Easy: write a script to download occurrence data from GBIF for a species and display them on a map
Medium: Draw a convex hull polygon around the points in the earlier test.
Hard: Clip the polygon you generated in medium test to world map (Keep only part of the polygon which is on land).