megaGen: Extract megadiverse genera of any plant family

Description

Produces a CSV file listing all mega-diverse genera for any plant family at Plants of the World Online (POWO) based on a provided numeric value as the threshold to be considered mega-diverse. Frodin (2004) suggests 500 species as the threshold.

Usage

megaGen(family,
        thld = 500,
        verbose = TRUE,
        save = FALSE,
        dir = "results_megaGen",
        filename = "output")

Value

A table with the following fields: family, genus, authors, scientific_name, species_number (counting of species within each genus), kew_id (each genus code within Kew's databases), powo_uri (URI to access each genus in POWO).

Arguments

family: Either one family name or a vector of multiple families that is present in POWO.
thld: A defined threshold of species number for a genus to be considered megadiverse. The default value is 500 based on Frodin (2004).
verbose: Logical, if FALSE, a message showing each step during the POWO search will not be printed in the console in full.
save: Logical, if TRUE, the search results will be saved on disk.
dir: Pathway to the computer's directory, where the file will be saved provided that the argument save is set up in TRUE. The default is to create a directory named results_megaGen and the search results will be saved within a subfolder named after the current date.
filename: Name of the output file to be saved. The default is to create a file entitled output.

Author

Debora Zuanny & Domingos Cardoso

Examples

Run this code

if (FALSE) {

library(expowo)

megaGen(family = "Cyperaceae",
        thld = 500,
        save = FALSE,
        dir = "results_megaGen",
        filename = "Cyperaceae_big_genera")
}