HostSwitch: An R Package to Simulate the Extent of Host-Switching by a Consumer

In biology a general definition for host switch is when an organism (consumer) uses a new host (which represents a resource). The host switch process by a consumer may happen through its pre-existing capability to use a sub-optimal resource. The HostSwitch R package provides functions to simulate the dynamics of host switching (extent and frequency) in the population of a consumer that interacts with current and potential hosts over the generations. The HostSwitch package is based on a Individual-Based mock-up model published in FORTRAN by Araujo et al. (2015). The package largely improve the previous mock-up model, by implementing numerous new functionalities such as comparison and evaluation of simulations with several customizable parameters to accommodate several types of biological consumer-host associations, an interactive visualization of the model, an in-depth description of the parameters in a biological context. Finally, we provided three real world scenarios taken from the literature selected from ecology, agriculture and parasitology.