Abstract
Climate change affects biodiversity in diverse ways, necessitating the
exploration of multiple climate dimensions using standardized metrics.
However, existing methods for quantifying these metrics are scattered
and tools for comparing alternative climate change metrics on the same
footing are lacking. To address this gap, we developed “climetrics”
which is an extensible and reproducible R package to spatially quantify
and explore multiple dimensions of climate change through a unified
procedure. Six widely used climate change metrics are currently
implemented, including 1) Standardized Local Anomalies; 2) Changes in
Probabilities of Local Climate Extremes; 3) Changes in Areas of
Analogous Climates; 4) Novel Climates; 5) Changes in Distances to
Analogous Climates; and 6) Climate Change Velocity. For climate change
velocity, three different algorithms are implemented and available
within the package including; a) Distanced-based Velocity (“dVe”); b)
Threshold-based Velocity (“ve”); and c) Gradient-based Velocity
(“gVe”). The package also provides additional tools to calculate the
monthly mean of climate variables over multiple years, to quantify and
map the temporal trend (slope) of a given climate variable at the pixel
level, and to classify and map Köppen-Geiger (KG) climate zones. The
climetrics R package is seamlessly integrated with the rts package for
efficient handling of raster time-series data. The functions in
climetrics are designed to be user-friendly, making them suitable for
less-experienced R users. Detailed comments and descriptions in their
help pages and vignettes of the package facilitate further customization
by advanced users. In summary, the climetrics R package offers a unified
framework for quantifying various climate change metrics, making it a
useful tool for characterizing multiple dimensions of climate change and
exploring their spatiotemporal patterns.