namesCompare: Checking species names for misspelling and synonyms

Description

The function cross-references two vectors of species names checking for possible synonyms, misspelled names, and genus-species or species-subspecies correspondence.

Usage

namesCompare(vec1,vec2,proportion=0.15)

Value

The function returns a list including:

$genus if vec1 includes genera names which miss specific epithet, this object lists all the species in vec2

belonging to each of the genera.

$subspecies if vec1 includes subspecies (i.e. two epithets after genus name), this object lists species in vec2

possibly corresponding to each of the subspecies.

$epithet lists species with matching epithets as possible synonyms.

$misspelling lists possible misspelled names. For each proposed mismatched names pair the proportion of characters in the

vec1 differing from the string in vec2 is returned.

Arguments

vec1, vec2: a vector of species names. Genus names only are also allowed. Generic name and specific epithet must be separated by '_'. Note that vec2 is used as the reference. Incomplete or suspicious names are better placed in vec1 (see example below).
proportion: the maximum proportion of different characters between any vec1-vec2 names pair to consider it a possible misspelling.

Author

Silvia Castiglione, Carmela Serio, Antonella Esposito

Examples

Run this code

if (FALSE) {
names(DataFelids$statefel)->nams
nams[c(19,12,37,80,43)]<-c("Puma_yagouaroundi","Felis_manul","Catopuma",
                           "Pseudaelurus","Panthera_zdansky")
nams<-nams[-81]

namesCompare(nams,names(DataFelids$statefel))
namesCompare(names(DataFelids$statefel),nams)
}