Mediterranean Landscape Simulation

Introduction

The R package medfateland has been designed to extend the capabilities of package medfate to a spatially-explicit context. It allows running the stand-level models available in medfate on points and cells within landscape or region, including the possibility of parallelization. Additionally, medfateland allows considering seed dispersal and lateral water transfer processes in forested watersheds. Hence, medfateland can be used as a tool for eco-hydrological applications.

Package installation

Since both packages evolve together, installing medfateland normally requires an up-to-date version of medfate.

Package medfateland can be found at CRAN, where it is updated every few months. Installation from CRAN can be done via:

install.packages("medfateland")

Users can also download and install the latest stable versions GitHub as follows (required package remotes should be installed/updated first):

remotes::install_github("emf-creaf/medfateland")

Documentation and training

A number of vignettes illustrate how to initialize inputs and run simulation models in medfateland. These can be found here. The user is also advised to read the articles about package medfate included here.
A complete documentation of both packages, including a reference book, can be found at https://emf-creaf.github.io/medfatebook/index.html.
Presentation slides for a course devoted to process-based forest modelling using packages medfate and medfateland can be found here.

Companion R packages

The modelling tools included in medfate and medfateland are closely developed with another package:

Package traits4models provides functions to help creating species parameter inputs for process-based models such as those in for medfate and medfateland functions.

Two other R packages complete the simulation framework, but can be used for many other purposes beyond forest modelling:

Package meteoland allows generating daily weather input for simulation models in medfate and medfateland. Package meteoland is a dependency for medfate and medfateland, but can be used independently to obtain daily weather data.
Package forestables allows reading and harmonizing forest inventory data to a common data structure. Initialization workflows in medfateland can use data from forestables, but the data structures of the package can be used for many studies beyond modelling.

The relationships between the five packages are illustrated in the figure below, where black arrows indicate package dependencies and gray arrows indicate model parameter or data provision.

Authorship

Package medfateland is developed and maintained by the Ecosystem Modelling Facility unit at CREAF (in Spain), in close collaboration with researchers from URFM-INRAE (in France) and CTFC (in Spain).