phyloraster: an R package to calculate measures of endemism and evolutionary diversity for rasters

Abstract

The spatial exploration of richness, endemism, and evolutionary diversity patterns has become an important tool for biogeography and conservation planning. As the volume and complexity of biogeographical and phylogenetic data increase, the need for efficient tools to manipulate and analyze these datasets becomes essential. The phyloraster package addresses this need by facilitating spatial diversity and endemism analysis. Our package offers a comprehensive set of functions tailored to explore results derived from species distribution models (SDMs) that incorporate species’ evolutionary history through phylogenetic relationships. It covers three main stages: pre-processing, processing, and post-processing of macroecological and phylogenetic data. During the pre-processing step, basic functions are provided to prepare the data before analysis. The processing step combines various functions to calculate Faith’s phylogenetic diversity, phylogenetic endemism, weighted endemism, and evolutionary distinctiveness. Additionally, this step includes functions to compute the standardized effect size for each metric using spatial and phylogenetic randomization methods, ensuring proper control for richness effects. The post-processing stage still includes functions to calculate the change of metrics between different times (e.g. present and future). In relation to processing in our functions, we show that phyloraster is faster that compute the same metrics and takes up considerably less RAM than the other packages that compute weighted endemism. Lower RAM usage minimizes the hardware requirements to work with high-resolution datasets from local to global scales. This broadens user accessibility of the spatialized measures of endemism and evolutionary diversity.

Publication