Siplab, a spatial individual-based plant modelling system

• Main Author: Oscar Garcia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences 2014-12-01
• Series: Computational Ecology and Software
• Subjects: competition;growth; forestry; plant ecology; simulation; R; individual-tree models
• Online Access: http://www.iaees.org/publications/journals/ces/articles/2014-4(4)/Siplab-spatial-individual-based-plant-modelling-system.pdf

Spatially-explicit individual-based models are important tools in forestry and plant ecology. They are commonly implemented through custom computer coding that is time-consuming, may cause compatibility and availability problems, and makes difficult the evaluation, comparison and re-use of model components. Siplab is an R package that aims at improving this situation with a flexible computing environment that can handle a variety of model forms, and without requiring advanced programming knowledge. The article briefly reviews spatial individual-plant models, and then explains the general framework used by siplab to represent such models in a unified way. The structure and practical use of the package are introduced through some of the examples previously discussed.