Package overview and features
The climatrics R package contains a separate function to facilitate quantifying each climate change metric, also a function (“ccm” ) to quantify some or several of the metrics together. Moreover, the package provides additional functions including “apply.months” , “kgc”, and “temporalTrend ” (Figure 1). The “apply.months” function is an auxiliary function that calculates monthly statistics from a time series of climate data. The output of apply.months contains twelve raster layers (from January to December). For instance, a user can choose the mean function as the input to calculate the monthly mean climate data for the 12 months.
The “kgc” function is another auxiliary function to calculate Köppen-Geiger (see Köppen, 1900; Peel et al., 2007) classification of climate data in a given location and time. The Köppen-Geiger system classifies the climate zones of the world into five main classes and 30 sub-classes (Chen & Chen, 2013; Beck et al., 2018) and is based on threshold values (See table S1 for criteria and legend) and seasonality of monthly temperature and precipitation. The “kgc ” function provides the inputs for calculating the Changes in Distance to Analogous Climates (daClimate) metrics in climetrics . The “temporalTrend” function quantifies the trend and pattern of climate parameters over time. A higher positive slope of the given climate variable represents an increase over time and a negative value represents temporal decline over time.