colorist: An r package for colouring wildlife distributions in space–time

Abstract

Understanding the forces that shape biological distributions in space and time is a fundamental goal of ecology (Andrewartha & Birch, 1954; Brown, Stevens, & Kaufman, 1996). Maps help to achieve that goal by giving form to complex sets of assumptions, hypotheses and predictions. Traditionally, biologists have used range maps, and home range maps, to describe the distributions of species, and individuals, in space and time (Burt, 1943; Grinnell, 1904). Despite their historical utility, both types of maps are incapable of communicating our increasingly nuanced understanding of wildlife distributions because of their reliance on binary (presence-absence) data. In recent years, data detailing animal distributions have become more abundant and available. Community science projects have collected hundreds of millions of observations of

Scientific maps should reach everyone: The cblindplot R package to let colour blind people visualise spatial patterns

“…Inspiring R packages have been devoted to improve mapping of various scientifically sound response variables like biodiversity (Féret and de Boissieu, 2020) or species distributions (Schuetz et al, 2020a;Schuetz et al, 2020b). Connecting the cblindplot package with such libraries would be an enormous advantage for colour blind people.…”