ecofolio is an R package to estimate ecological portfolio effects. Currently it focuses on metapopulations or metapopulation-like systems.

A financial portfolio metaphor is often used to describe how population diversity can make a group of populations more stable, much like how investing in a diverse set of assets makes a financial portfolio more stable. For example, we can treat the abundance of salmon in one stream as financial stock value and the abundance of salmon within a river catchment as a financial portfolio. If a group of populations are stressed and react differently then the risk of collapse or decline of the group may be lowered, similar to a diversified financial portfolio. This risk reduction has been referred to as the "portfolio effect".

To cite this package please cite the accompanying paper:

Anderson, S.C., A.B. Cooper, N.K. Dulvy. 2013. Ecological prophets: Quantifying metapopulation portfolio effects. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. In Press. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.12093.

The published version of the paper is available here. And a pre-print is available here [PDF].

You can install ecofolio with the following:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("seananderson/ecofolio")

You can load the package, read the vignette, and view the help pages with:

library(ecofolio)
vignette("ecofolio")
help(package = "ecofolio")

If you have problems installing the package or using the functions, please email sean "at" seananderson.ca.