RangeShifter: Enhanced Tools for Eco-evolutionary Modelling of Species Range Dynamics

Under the threat of environmental changes, including climate and land-use change, the need to predict impacts on biodiversity, species distributions, and management decisions is becoming increasingly important. Process-based models are valuable tools for predicting ecological responses to environmental change and for understanding the underlying dynamics. RangeShifter is a spatially explicit, individual-based modelling framework designed to simulate eco-evolutionary processes and assess species’ responses to climate and/or land-use change. The model consists of three main modules: a demography module, simulating population dynamics; a dispersal module, encompassing emigration, transfer, and settlement processes; and a genetics module, enabling adaptation and tracking the populations’ genetic health. Each module can be parameterized from simple to complex representations, offering users a high degree of flexibility to adapt the model to their specific research questions.

First introduced in 2014  and available since 2021 also as an R package, RangeShifter has been applied to a wide range of species, from small insects to large mammals, and in various ecological contexts, including predicting range shifts, informing conservation planning, optimizing reintroduction management strategies, and addressing theoretical questions such as the consequences of habitat fragmentation on movement patterns and the evolution of dispersal traits. The latest major update introduces four additional features now available to all users.

We present these new features implemented in the most recent development phase of RangeShifter. The framework now provides an expanded genetic module enabling forward-time population genetics simulations, allowing users to explore evolutionary dynamics and genetic diversity in more detail. Importantly, the framework is no longer anymore to simulating single species but can now simulate multiple interacting species, thus scaling up to community-level processes. In addition, the updated version can incorporate demographic rates that vary in space and time, and supports the explicit simulation of translocations as a management strategy.

These enhancements expand the platform’s range of applications and provide users with greater flexibility in model design and conceptualization. Continued development of modelling frameworks such as RangeShifter opens new avenues for mechanistic, spatially explicit studies of species and community responses to environmental change.