Ecotrends: an R package for estimating habitat suitability trends over time

ecotrends is an R package that provides a comprehensive framework for assessing species vulnerability by analysing temporal trends in habitat suitability. The framework consists of calculating ecological niche models successively on the same species occurrence data over time, using a time series of environmental variables, for any period and periodicity. Then, a trend analysis of habitat suitability is performed with Sen's slope, based on non-parametric Kendall's rank correlation. ecotrends includes functions for automatically gathering a yearly time series of environmental data from TerraClimate, calculating and evaluating Maxent models, assessing temporal trends in habitat suitability, and estimating variable importance. Although the built-in functions facilitate the use of a specific environmental database and modelling method, ecotrends works as well with any variables and models the user may provide. This adaptable framework can be applied to any taxon or guild, study area, spatial scale, or temporal resolution, as long as the required data are available. ecotrends offers a valuable tool for estimating species vulnerability over time and for supporting the evaluation of conservation measures. ecotrends allows the analysis of habitat suitability trends over time, requiring only species occurrence data and a time series of environmental data.