This package helps computing spatial early warning signals of critical transitions. This is part of a collaborative project between Sonia Kefi's group (Institut de Sciences d'Evolution, CNRS, IRD, Université Montpellier, France) and Vishwesha Guttal's (Center for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India).
The R package provides several sets of functions related to the computation of early warning signals of ecosystem tipping points and irreversible transitions (also known as catastrophic shifts). In particular, it facilitates computing those indicators, assess their significance and plot their trends.
To understand the context behind those indicators, and see how they can be computed, the best way is to have a look at our paper about the package:
For more advanced users and/or technical questions that may arise, a FAQ is also available there.
Alain Danet, Alexandre Génin (Maintainer), Vishwesha Guttal, Sonia Kefi, Sabiha Majumder, Sumithra Sankaran, Florian Schneider
spatialwarnings
is available on CRAN and can be installed through:
install.packages('spatialwarnings')
The development version of this package can be installed using the
devtools
package in R:
if ( ! require(devtools) ) {
install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("spatial-ews/spatialwarnings")
Ecological systems can suffer drastic transitions such as desertification or eutrophication, sometimes even after a slight change in one or more external parameters, such as aridity or nutrient input. These qualitative changes in the behavior of a system at a threshold represents a critical or bifurcation point, and can give rise to catastrophic shifts when associated with irreversibility. A growing body of litterature suggests that a dynamical system should exhibit certain measurable properties around those critical points.
This package aims at providing a practical set of tools for the detection of these upcoming critical points in spatial datasets, by using indicators based on those properties. Some of those indicators fall within broad families around which the package is centered:
- "Generic" spatial indicators
- Spectrum-based indicators
- Indicators based on patch-size distributions
Each of these indicator types can be computed with this package, along with other, newer ones. Their significance can be assessed using permutation-based tests and results can be displayed using familiar summary/plot methods.
In total, spatialwarnings provides the following spatial indicators published in the literature:
- lag-1 autocorrelation (Moran's I, Dakos et al. 2010)
- Variance (Guttal et al. 2008)
- Skewness (Guttal et al. 2008)
- SDR Ratio (Kéfi et al. 2014)
- Patch-size distribution shape (Kéfi et al. 2011)
- Power-law range (Berdugo et al. 2017)
- Flowlength (Rodriguez et al. 2017)
- Kolmogorov complexity (Dakos et al. 2017)
A simple analysis with spatialwarnings
could fit in a few lines of code:
> library(ggplot2)
> library(spatialwarnings)
>
> # Compute indicators
> serengeti.ic <- generic_spews(serengeti,
> subsize = 5,
> moranI_coarse_grain = TRUE)
> serengeti.test <- indictest(serengeti.ic)
> # Textual summary of trends
> summary(serengeti.test)
Generic Spatial Early-Warnings
Mat. # Mean Moran's I P>null Skewness P>null Variance P>null
1 0.98 0.58 <1e-03 *** -6.94 0.999 0.011 <1e-03 ***
2 0.98 0.62 <1e-03 *** -6.17 0.999 0.012 <1e-03 ***
3 0.97 0.51 <1e-03 *** -5.59 0.999 0.015 <1e-03 ***
4 0.96 0.68 <1e-03 *** -4.56 0.999 0.022 <1e-03 ***
5 0.96 0.66 <1e-03 *** -4.37 0.999 0.024 <1e-03 ***
6 0.95 0.62 <1e-03 *** -3.84 0.999 0.031 <1e-03 ***
7 0.95 0.79 <1e-03 *** -3.96 0.999 0.034 <1e-03 ***
8 0.94 0.75 <1e-03 *** -3.40 0.999 0.041 <1e-03 ***
9 0.93 0.66 <1e-03 *** -3.26 0.999 0.040 <1e-03 ***
10 0.93 0.58 <1e-03 *** -3.02 0.999 0.040 <1e-03 ***
11 0.89 0.58 <1e-03 *** -2.29 0.999 0.054 <1e-03 ***
12 0.85 0.62 <1e-03 *** -1.75 0.999 0.074 <1e-03 ***
13 0.71 0.72 <1e-03 *** -0.87 0.999 0.131 <1e-03 ***
Significance tested against 999 randomly shuffled matrices
Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
> # Plot trends
> plot(serengeti.test, along = serengeti.rain) +
> geom_vline(xintercept = 593, color = "red", linetype = "dashed") +
> labs(x = "Annual rainfall",
> y = "Mean cover/indicator value",
> title = "Early warning signals of a shift in tree cover in Serengeti, Tanzania (Eby et al. 2016)",
> subtitle = "Grey ribbons indicate the 5-95% quantiles of the null distribution")
This package is derived from the Dakos et al.'s work on early warnings signals (see also the reference website for the early-warnings signals toolbox).
This work is licensed under an MIT license. Some code included in unit tests has been written by Cosma Rohilla Shalizi http://bactra.org/ and is redistributed in its entirety with the source of this R package as specified in its README file.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 the authors
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