Contents
The estar package implements a standardised toolkit for calculating a wide range of ecological stability metrics from time-series and community data, enabling researchers to quantify how individuals, populations and communities respond to disturbances. It includes one set of functions for so-called ‘functional’ stability properties (e.g., invariability, resistance, persistence, recovery extent and rate, overall ecological vulnerability) applied to single state variables, and another for ‘Jacobian’ stability properties (e.g., reactivity, maximal amplification, initial and asymptotic resilience, and intrinsic stochastic invariability) that measure community stability. estar supports comparisons across scales and ecological levels. In this course, Ludmilla Figueiredo and Viktoria Radchuk will introduce and exemplify the basic functions and explain the options for incorporating reference-system dynamics. We will discuss the system features and the data formats required to use the package. Importantly, we will look at the Multivariate autoregressive state-space models that underlie the computation of Jacobian stability metrics.
Your will get familiarized with the diverse metrics available to quantify ecological stability and you will further learn to use the estar package, one of the few pieces of software currently available for analysing ecological stability.
Lecturer
Dr Ludmilla Figueiredo
Ludmilla is a biologist specialized in ecological modelling through her Master’s and PhD. She is now the Data & Code Curator for the iDiv Data Portal, where, among other tasks, she reviews data or code documentation before its publication. In addition, she is also the author and maintainer of an R package “estar”.
Dr Viktoria Radchuk
Viktoria is a senior scientist at the IZW. Her research lays at the intersection of population ecology, community ecology, disturbance ecology, and conservation biology. She develops and applies advanced statistical tools and simulation models to assess biological responses to global change, with the ultimate goal of providing conservation advice to mitigate potential negative impacts.