Estimating Climate Stability from Climate Model Data

Climate stability measures are not formalized in the literature and tools for generating stability metrics from existing data are nascent. This package provides tools for calculating climate stability from raster data encapsulating climate change as a series of time slices. The methods follow Owens and Guralnick Biodiversity Informatics.

climateStability

The goal of climateStability is to provide a simple set of R-based tools to generate climate stability estimates based on time slices of climate data.

Installation

You can install climateStability from github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("hannahlowens/climateStability")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to calculate climate stability using time-slice datasets for two variables:

# First, calculate deviation through time using even time slices
precipDeviation <- deviationThroughTime(variableDirectory = "YOUR_DIRECTORY/precipitationFiles/",
                                        timeSlicePeriod = 1000, fileExtension = "asc");
temperatureDeviation <- deviationThroughTime(variableDirectory = "YOUR_DIRECTORY/temperatureFiles/",
                                             timeSlicePeriod = 1000, fileExtension = "asc");

# Next, calculate stability for each variable (the inverse of deviation, scaled to between 0 and 1)
precipInvDev <- stabilityCalc(precipDeviation);
tempInvDev <- stabilityCalc(temperatureDeviation);

# Finally, multiply them together and rescale to estimate relative climate stability
climateStability <- rescale0to1(precipStability * tempStability)

For more information, refer to the vignette.

browseVignettes("climateStability")

Citation

If you use the package you can cite the article that describes the package:

Owens, H.L., Guralnick, R., 2019. climateStability: An R package to estimate climate stability from time-slice climatologies. Biodiversity Informatics 14, 8–13. https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v14i0.9786

You can also access the citation information through R using the following command:

citation(package = "climateStability")
#> 
#> To cite climateStability in publications use:
#> 
#>   Owens, H.L., Guralnick, R., 2019. climateStability: An R package to
#>   estimate climate stability from time-slice climatologies.
#>   Biodiversity Informatics 14, 8–13.
#>   https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v14i0.9786
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Article{,
#>     title = {climateStability: An R package to estimate climate stability from time-slice climatologies},
#>     author = {{Hannah L. Owens} and {Robert Guralnick}},
#>     journal = {Biodiversity Informatics},
#>     year = {2019},
#>     volume = {14},
#>     pages = {8-13},
#>     doi = {10.17161/bi.v14i0.9786},
#>   }