portalcasting: Supporting automated forecasting of rodent populations.

The portalcasting package provides a model development, deployment, and evaluation system for forecasting how ecological systems change through time, with a focus on a widely used long-term study of mammal population and community dynamics, the Portal Project (Brown, 1998; Brown & Davidson, 1977; Ernest, Yenni, Allington, Bledsoe, Christensen, Diaz, Goheen, et al., 2018). The software is designed to encourage the active engagement of the broad ecological modeling community in understanding the dynamics of this well-sampled empirical system and forecasting future changes. The initial infrastructure for continuous analysis and forecasting at the site provided a functional system for running existing models repeatedly (White et al., 2018). However, it did not facilitate the development and evaluation of new models. The portalcasting package combines existing R packages for modeling (e.g., JAGS), forecasting (e.g., forecast) and data management (e.g., portalr) into a continuous pipeline that produces new forecasts and allows for new model development.