Introduction
Package traits4models is designed to facilitate creating plant species parameter tables for process-based models of forest function and/or dynamics. Specifically utility functions are provided to harmonize plant trait data bases and defining tables from them. At present, species parameter estimation is tailored to be used for the models included in packages medfate and medfateland, but it other functions could be added to become useful for other process-based models.
Package installation
Since both packages evolve together, installing traits4models normally requires an up-to-date version of package medfate, which is available at CRAN.
The latest stable versions GitHub as follows (required package `remotes`` should be installed/updated first):
remotes::install_github("emf-creaf/traits4models")Documentation
A number of vignettes illustrate how to initialize inputs and run simulation models in traits4models. These can be found at the package website.
Companion R packages
The development of traits4models is intended to complement packages medfate and medfateland.
Two other 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
The set of R packages are 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).
