Ramas (Applied Biomathematics) software

EcoLab serves as an interactive companion to two of our e-books, Conservation Biology and Applied Population Ecology.

RAMAS® Landscape integrates the landscape model LANDIS with our RAMAS®/GIS habitat-based metapopulation model. With the integration of a landscape and a metapopulation model, predictions about the viability, recovery, and growth of a species can be based on the predicted changes in the landscapes in which they live.

Electronic and web-based teaching materials that lead students through interactive, inquiry-based lessons in ecology and environmental science. Online laboratory course material for teaching environmental science, ecology, and conservation biology. Inquiry-based learning for high school, college, and graduate students, written by active research scientists. Instructor supplements include suggestions for teaching, additional reference material, and keys to questions and exercises.

In nature, most species exist in metapopulations, seen in fragmented habitats or on archipelagos, where the spatial structure of the environment affects the population dynamics. RAMASMetapop is a powerful tool for population viability analysis (PVA), as well as an interactive program that allows you to build models for species that live in multiple patches. The program has a multitude of uses such as predicting extinction risks and exploring management options such as reserve design, translocations and reintroductions, and to assess human impact on fragmented populations. In addition, RAMAS Metapop incorporates the spatial aspects of metapopulation dynamics, such as the configuration of the populations, dispersal and recolonization among patches and the similarity of environmental patterns the populations experience.

RAMAS® GIS is designed to link your GIS with a metapopulation model for population viability analysis (PVA) and extinction risk assessment. Habitats used by most species are becoming increasingly fragmented, requiring a metapopulation modeling approach to risk analysis. Recognizing habitat patchiness from an endangered species` point of view requires spatial information on habitat suitability. RAMAS® GIS meets both of these requirements by linking metapopulation modeling with landscape data and GIS technology.

RAMAS Multispecies Assessment is a conservation planning tool that intelligently combines status of viability information across multiple species to deliver geographically explicit habitat conservation values. Input what you know about population status, habitat requirements, and threats. The tool is flexible to fit your data: you can use as little data for each species as a location map and its listed status. If you have more data, build detailed habitat and metapopulation models. Taken to its full potential, Mutispecies delivers quantitative conservation guidance without the use of rules of thumb, providing a valuable counterpart to rules-based conservation planning tools.

RAMAS Ecotoxicology is used to make population-level ecological risk assessments for environmental contaminants. It imports data from standard laboratory bioassays, incorporates these data into the parameters of a population model, and performs a risk assessment by analyzing population-level differences between control and impacted samples.

RAMAS® Ecosystem performs ecological risk assessments for food chain and food web models, linking bioassay results to community dynamics. It imports data from standard laboratory bioassays, incorporates these data into the parameters of a population model, and performs a risk assessment by analyzing population-level differences between control and impacted samples. RAMAS® Ecosystem facilitates the management of variability and uncertainty in data, expressing results as ecological risks.

A free web app for characterizing temporal change in ecological communities. This web application implements the methods for measuring temporal change in communities described in Spencer (2015)(1). The paper introduces a measure of change in relative abundances (the “shape” of a community) that complements measures of mean proportional change in abundance (the “size” of a community) such as the Living Planet Index (2).

RAMAS® Red List Professional consists of three integrated modules: RAMAS Red List 3.0, Temporal Analysis Module, and Spatial Analysis Module. RAMAS Red List 3.0 makes threatened species assessments, while the Temporal and Spatial Analysis Models estimate the parameters that are required as input data for a Red List assessment.