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Life on the edge

a new informatic toolbox to predict population vulnerability to global change

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We have recently developed a novel informatic toolbox applicable to any species or geographic area to predict vulnerability to global change, ultimately aimed at improving conservation prioritisation and monitoring efforts. You can find the preprint here and the DRYAD and ZENODO repositories for data and code here

The toolbox facilitates the integration of environmental (e.g. climate, land use), ecological (e.g. spatial occurrences), and evolutionary (e.g. genome-wide SNP) data via a series of modular scripts and functions. The toolbox can be run from start to finish (i.e. raw spatial, environmental and genomic data) through to final population vulnerability maps), or specific modules can be used separately (e.g. if you just want to build Species Distribution Models, look at population striucture or perform Genotype Environment Association analyses).

We follow the frameworks of two main papers, Razgour et al. 2018 and Razgour et al. 2019, via a series of scripts and functions that have been generalised with flexible code to accomodate any species input data from any geographic region. The toolbox estimates four main metrics for each population/sampling locality:

These four metrics are then assessed to calculate final Population vulnerability (see figures below for workflow and final output)

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The toolbox runs from a Params.tsv file (up to 71 parameters which may be defined/modified), and all you need to provide are the spatial, enviromental and genomic input data per species (or specify do auto-download the enviromental data from Worldclim)

Below a list of some of the things you can do using the Life on the edge toolbox: