RangeShifter

RangeShifter is a software platform for modelling species range shifts in response to environmental change. It provides a spatially explicit, individual-based modelling framework that integrates landscape structure, habitat suitability, and demographic processes to simulate how populations disperse, establish new populations, and persist as climates and habitats change.

The model represents individuals or cohorts with life-history traits such as survival, fecundity, and age structure, along with dispersal behaviour and stochastic events. Landscapes are input as grids or maps with habitat quality or carrying capacity values. RangeShifter can simulate varying climate and land-use scenarios, habitat fragmentation, and barriers to movement, allowing users to test conservation strategies such as habitat restoration, corridor creation, or managed relocation.

Outputs include occupancy maps, local population sizes, colonization times, range expansion rates, and measures of connectivity or genetic structure over time. The framework is used to inform ecological research and conservation planning across taxa, including birds, mammals, insects, and amphibians, by comparing scenarios and assessing uncertainties in dispersal and demography.

RangeShifter has been described in peer-reviewed literature as a flexible tool for studying range dynamics. It is supported by documentation, tutorials, and example datasets to help researchers and practitioners apply the platform to real-world questions.