Wallace 2.0 is out!

I’m thrilled to have been part of a paper out in Ecography today: “wallace 2: a shiny app for modeling species niches and distributions redesigned to facilitate expansion via module contributions”. It updates the original wallace R package, which is a really useful tool for teaching niche modeling in the R ecosystem without requiring students to be exceptionally proficient at coding first. All a person needs do is execute two lines of code, and a graphical user interface pops up that walks them through the steps of a niche modeling analysis, while documenting the decisions made along the way in R code file that can re-run to repeat the analyses.

There is a lot of potential for this approach to be used to teach students the workflows and methods involved in fairly complex niche modeling analyses. I have incorporated it into teaching materials for Masters' and PhD level courses, as well as non-academic workshops, and the new features really expand the scope of applications one can cover. wallace 2.0 also makes it easier to add custom modules to the wallace workflow (essentially analysis options, like specific statistics or data sources), and adds several such modules (including my occCite occurrence citation package).

Here's the package website, which includes links to tutorials in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, and Japanese: wallaceecomod.github.io

Here’s the citation: 
Kass, J.M., Pinilla-Buitrago, G.E., Paz, A., Johnson, B.A., Grisales-Betancur, V., Meenan, S.I., Attali, D., Broennimann, O., Galante, P.J., Maitner, B.S., Owens, H.L., Varela, S., Aiello-Lammens, M.E., Merow, C., Blair, M.E. and Anderson, R.P. (2023), wallace 2: a shiny app for modeling species niches and distributions redesigned to facilitate expansion via module contributions. Ecography e06547. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.06547