An integrated package to evaluate climatic suitability for agriculture

We developed a tool in R language called agroclim to compute climatic indices related to agriculture development. Using a wide collection of functions and based on daily temperature series, the users are able to: 1) assess the general suitability of specific locations; 2) check the probability of occurrence of extreme temperatures; and 3) evaluate the climatic suitability for specific crops. These features are based on the use of agroclimatic indicators, trying to capture the effect of climate in crops, from sowing to maturity. Furthermore, a group of functions is dedicated to handle multidimensional datasets to i) retrieve climatic data; ii) compute the indices over spatially-continuous datasets; and iii) export results in a 3-dimension format. Using a high-resolution temperature dataset of Spain as an input exemplar, we computed the complete set of agroclimatic indices to selected locations and mapped several of them to show their potential for spatial analysis of climatic suitability.