ModestR Software

   ModestR is a software tool aimed to provide academic community (particularly people involved in Ecology and biodiversity management) with a powerful but easy-to-use tool for working with species distribution maps and taxonomic data.

   Why we believe ModestR is interesting and different? Some reasons are (but not only):

• It supports range maps (areas), sample maps (occurrence records) or even a mix of both.

• It works basing on species habitats. You can select allowed habitats for each species. Then, for example, ModestR can automatically filter occurrence records, apply a convex hull or calculate EOO only taking into account species allowed habitats.

• It allows creating species distribution databases structured on a taxonomic hierarchy (see DataManager below). You can then work with any taxonomic group as a whole, quite as easily as with a single species.

• It can perform complex or time consuming tasks on any taxonomic group of a database in a batch way. For example, you can launch a task to download data from GBIF for any taxonomic group (a class, an order…), or apply a hull transformation in an entire database, in a single operation. This way, working with thousands of species distribution maps is made very easy.

• It provides very useful features such as guided data cleaning, hull transformations using alpha shape or kernel density functions, Niche of Occurrence estimation, raster displaying capabilities, and many others.

• It generates several analyses and summarized data for any taxonomic group: AOO, EOO, richness, gradients, metrics, etc.

• It allows integrating environmental variables in an easy way, to use them in data cleaning or to generate reports that merge species distribution data and environmental data.

• You can easily search for species in any region of the world and generate reports, just by selecting the wanted region in the map (see MRFinder below).

• You can easily make maps where multiple species or ranks are shown, and calculate spatial overlaps (see MRMapping below).

• It allows exchanging data in several formats. So you can easily import existing distribution data to ModestR, or export ModestR outputs to post-process them in 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.