VoCC: An r package for calculating the velocity of climate change and related climatic metrics

Abstract

Climate change is a primary global driver of biodiversity reorganization. The velocity of clisecondary functions, or to produce output for display (see mate change and related metrics describe the spatial change of climatic variables over time, allowing quantification of climate change exposure and connectivity, facilitating insights into the potential scope of species’ range‐shift responses. These metrics have been extensively used in climate‐change ecology research and provide useful information for conservation. Multiple extensions to the original concept of climate velocity have been proposed since first presented nearly a decade ago. However, despite its utility, no software application is currently available that brings all these methods together. The r package VoCC fills this gap by providing a comprehensive collection of functions that calculate climate velocity and related metrics from their initial formulation to the latest developments. Here, we introduce the core package functionality through a series of applied examples. The collection of functions in the VoCC package represents a new, useful addition to the existing portfolio of tools with which to assess risks posed by climate change to species and ecosystems.

Rapid climate change results in long-lasting spatial homogenization of phylogenetic diversity

“…The climate change velocity indicates the rate at which climate is displacing spatially on a yearly basis. Traditionally, two forms of Vocc calculation have emerged, a distance-based and a gradient-based approach 73 . To calculate the velocity of climate change since the LGM (Vocc), we used the gradient-based approach using the gVocc function provided in the VoCC Rpackage 35,73 and generated Vocc similarly as was done in a previous study 74 .…”

“…All analyses were conducted in the R environment 62 (version 3.5.1). The packages and codes used include Taxonstand 61 (version 2.1), ape 82 (version 5.3), stringr 83 (version 1.3.1), S.PhyloMaker 63 , FNN 84 (version 1.1.2.1), raster 72 (version 2.9.23), rgdal 85 (version 1.3.4), VoCC 73 (version 1.0.0), climateStability 76 (version 0.1.1), kissmig 36 (version 1.0.3), betapart 79…”

Classifying biogeographic realms of the endemic fauna in the Afro‐Arabian region

“…We calculated climate-change velocity over the last 21,000 years using the method developed by Loarie et al (2009). Based on current mean annual temperature and last glacial maximum mean annual temperature from WorldClim data, we calculated the velocity using "dVoCC" function implemented in "VoCC" R package (García Molinos, Schoeman, Brown, & Burrows, 2019).…”

Incorporating climate velocity into the design of climate-smart networks of protected areas

“…We calculated local climate velocity (after Burrows et al (2011)) and climate-velocity trajectories (after Burrows 53 et al (2014)) for the period 2020-2100 using the VoCC R package (García Molinos et al, 2019) and sea surface 54 temperature (SST) projections from the MPI-ESM1-2-HR model at 0.5° spatial resolution (Figure 1a-b). We used 55 an intermediate climate scenario generated under one of the IPCC Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs), 56 SSP2(4.5), which represents intermediate challenges for mitigation with radiative forcing levels equivalent to 57 RCP4.5 (radiative forcing is stabilized at ~4.5 W m -2 by 2100).…”

“…Instead, representing climate-17 velocity trajectory classes is a simple and easy-to-use method to meet this climate-smart objective at a 18 community level (Brito-Morales et al, 2018), building ecological resilience (Mcleod et al, 2019) and improving 19 the adaptive capacity of ecosystems under a spectrum of future ecological conditions (Roberts et al, 2017;20 Tittensor et al, 2019). They are also relatively straightforward to calculate now using the recent VoCC package 21 in R (García Molinos et al, 2019). 22 23…”