EARTH CODE LAB
Understanding how biodiversity formed and evolved is a key challenge in evolutionary and ecological biology [Newbold2016] . Despite a theoretical consensus on how best to measure biodiversity from a biological perspective (_i.e._ number of species, length of all branches on the tree of life of a species, and differences in allele and genotype frequencies within species) standardised and cost-effective methods for assessing it on a broad range of scales are lacking [Chiarucci2011] . Estimates of some of thes
In 2016, a new metric called the Landscape Elevational Connectivity (LEC) was proposed to estimate biodiversity in mountainous landscape [Bertuzzo2016] . It efficiently measures the landscape resistance to migration and is able to account for up to 70% of biodiversity predicted by meta-community models [Bertuzzo2016] .
bioLEC is a Python package designed to quickly calculate for any mountainous landscape surface and species niche width its associated LEC index. From an elevational fitness perspective, all migratory paths on a flat landscape are equal. This is not the case on a complex landscape where migration can only occur along a network of corridors providing species with their elevational requirements. Hence, predicting how species will disperse across a landscape requires a model of migration that takes into account
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