nicheR: Ellipsoid-Based Virtual Niches and Visualization

Provides a robust set of tools for researchers and modelers to construct and define virtual ecological niches using ellipsoid geometries. It enables the identification and extraction of suitable environmental areas, simulation of species occurrence points with various sampling strategies, and visualization of niche boundaries and simulated occurrences in both environmental and geographic space. Inspired by methodologies in 'NicheA' and the 'virtualspecies' R package, 'nicheR' aims to streamline the process of niche conceptualization and data generation for ecological studies. Methodological and theoretical foundations are described in Peterson et al. (2011, ISBN:9780691136882), Etherington et al. (2009) <doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2008.02041.x>, Qiao et al. (2015) <doi:10.1111/ecog.01961>, Nunez-Penichet et al. (2021) <doi:10.21425/F5FBG52142>, Cobos and Peterson (2022) <doi:10.17161/bi.v17i.15985>, Alkishe et al. (2022) <doi:10.5194/we-22-33-2022>, and Leroy et al. (2015) <doi:10.1111/ecog.01388>.

Version: 0.1.0
Depends: R (≥ 3.5)
Imports: terra
Suggests: rgl (≥ 1.3), knitr, rmarkdown
Published: 2026-06-16
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.nicheR (may not be active yet)
Author: Mariana Castaneda-Guzman ORCID iD [aut, cre], Connor Hughes ORCID iD [aut], Paanwaris Paansri ORCID iD [aut], Marlon E. Cobos ORCID iD [aut]
Maintainer: Mariana Castaneda-Guzman <marianacg at vt.edu>
BugReports: https://github.com/castanedaM/nicheR/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/castanedaM/nicheR, https://castanedam.github.io/nicheR/
NeedsCompilation: no
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: nicheR results

Documentation:

Reference manual: nicheR.html , nicheR.pdf
Vignettes: Bias surface (source, R code)
Creating Ellipsoid Based Niches (source, R code)
Generate occurrence data (source, R code)
Visualizing ellipsoids in environmental space (source, R code)
Predicting suitability and Mahalanobis distance (source, R code)
Virtual community simulation (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: nicheR_0.1.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: nicheR_0.1.0.zip, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: nicheR_0.1.0.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): nicheR_0.1.0.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): nicheR_0.1.0.tgz, r-release (x86_64): nicheR_0.1.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): nicheR_0.1.0.tgz

Linking:

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