splist2presabs: Convert a species list to a presence-absence table

Description

This function takes a locality+species dataset in long (stacked) format, i.e., a matrix or data frame containing localities in one column and their recorded species in another column, and converts them to a presence-absence table (wide format) suitable for mapping and for computing distributional similarities (see e.g. simMat). Try out the Examples below for an illustration).

Usage

splist2presabs(data, sites.col, sp.col, keep.n = FALSE)

Value

A data frame containing the localities in the first column and then one column per species indicating their presence or absence (or their number of records if keep.n = TRUE). Type 'data(rotif.env); head(rotif.env[,18:47])' (without the quote marks) in the R console for an example.

Arguments

data: a matrix or data frame with localities in one column and species in another column. Type or paste 'data(rotifers); head(rotifers)' (without the quote marks) in the R console for an example.
sites.col: the name or index number of the column containing the localities in 'data'.
sp.col: the name or index number of the column containing the species names or codes in 'data'.
keep.n: logical value indicating whether to get in the resulting table the number of times each species appears in each locality; if FALSE (the default), only presence (1) or absence (0) is recorded.

Author

A. Marcia Barbosa

Examples

Run this code

data(rotifers)

head(rotifers)

rotifers.presabs <- splist2presabs(rotifers, sites.col = "TDWG4",
sp.col = "species", keep.n = FALSE)

head(rotifers.presabs)