ModestR Software
ModestR is a a powerful but easy-to-use software tool for working with species distributions and taxonomic data. It is oriented to academic community, particularly people involved in Ecology and biodiversity management.
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Why we believe ModestR is interesting and different? Some reasons are (but not only):
- It supports both range maps and occurrence records or even a mix of both.
- It allows discriminating species habitats.
- It supports creating and managing very large species distribution databases structured on a taxonomic way.
- It allows easily integrating raster data (e.j. environmental variables) and using them on many analyses.
- It allows defining 3D environmental variables (e.j. multiple marine depth layers, or multiple year scenarios) and using them on many analyses, such as estimating diversity in different climatic scenarios.
- It can perform complex time consuming tasks on any group of species in a batch way. This way, working with thousands of species distribution maps is made very easy.
- It provides very useful features such as guided data cleaning, Extend-Of-Occurrence using alpha shape or kernel density functions, inventories completeness, 2D and 3D SDM estimation, and many others.
- It generates several analyses: AOO, EOO, richness, gradients, metrics, etc.
- It already integrates several shape datasets (e.j. administrative regions, river basins) and using them on many analyses.
- You can easily search for species in any region of the world, just by selecting the wanted region in the map.
- You can easily calculate spatial overlaps and analyse species niche.
- It allows exchanging data in several formats. So you can easily exchange data with Excel or R, for example.
- It is continuously improving with new features. We are constantly maintaining and refining ModestR to make it more user-friendly, but also more CPU-friendly. In this regard ModestR already takes advantage of multicore CPU’s to perform tasks faster.
ModestR is made up of four main applications: MapMaker, DataManager, MRFinder and MRMapping
ModestR is continuously improving to be more intuitive, faster and more useful. It is particularly CPU friendly, taking advantage of the current multi-core CPUs to perform complex calculations faster.
By default, a high precision world map is included in the ModestR installation package (©OpenStreetMap contributors, http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright). This map contains by default only sea and land areas, but it can be optionally complemented with full freshwater data, also available in this website.
Also a ModestR taxonomic database based on fishes taxonomy data from IPez project with several maps is also available for download from this site, and it is regularly updated with taxonomy data and last modifications.