ecoTolerance: An R package for Assessing Road and Human Footprint Tolerance in Wildlife Species

Most wildlife species currently inhabit areas transformed by human activity, a hallmark of the Anthropocene. Habitat alterations caused by the creation of roads and other human-made infrastructures shape the spatial distribution of wildlife species and their interaction with the environment. While some sensitive species disappear, more tolerant ones thrive near humans. Therefore, a streamlined tool to quantify the tolerance of different species to human pressures is useful to conservation, in particular to identify more vulnerable species. Here, we present ecoTolerance, an open-source R package that calculates two complementary, continuous metrics: the Road Tolerance Index (RTI), derived from the distance of each occurrence record to the nearest road, and the Human-Footprint Tolerance Index (HFTI), based on the global human-footprint raster. This package is based on a workflow that includes separate functions and arguments to automate data cleaning, spatial thinning, distance extraction, species-level summarization and map generation. As an applied example of its use and application, we processed 3782 records of five species: Copaifera langsdorffii (1407 observations), Bradypus variegatus (724), Sylvilagus brasiliensis (274), Boana faber (1226), and Boana boans (151), revealing RTI values that ranged from 0.183 to 0.654 and HFTI values from 0.111 to 0.392. the values of the two indices varied according to the incidence of road kill, as well as the habitat preference of the particular species. These examples demonstrate that ecoTolerance facilitates a rapid and streamlined assessment of species tolerance and vulnerability, providing valuable insights with potential to inform conservation actions.