mefa (version 1.1-4)

mefa-package: Multivariate Count Data Handling in Ecology and Biogeography

Description

R package for multivariate count data handling in ecology and biogeography. The name 'mefa' stands for the term 'metafaunistics' indicating that data handling is the most critical and sometimes most time consuming part of data analysis. The package contains object classes and functions to manipulate basic biotic (sample/species/count or crosstabulated) count data and relational attribute tables for samples and species. Functions can handle segments (eg. life stages, gender) within the count data and samples with zero count. Reports are generated in plain text or LaTeX format. S3 object classes provided by this package are: sscount for catch results of a field experiment referenced according to samples and species, samples with zero total count can be indicated, rows can be assigned to segments. xcount for sample/species crosstabulation of an object of class sscount, samples with zero total count are retained, one xcount object refers to one segment only. xorder contains sample or species specific attributes, subsetted and ordered according to rows/columns of an object of class xcount. mefa contains data of an xcount and up to two xorder objects (for sample and species attributes). Utility functions are provided to check, manipulate objects with print and plot S3 methods.

References

Solymos P. 2008. mefa: an R package for handling and reporting count data. Community Ecology 9, 125--127. http://mefa.r-forge.r-project.org/

Examples

library(mefa)
demo(dolina)               ## Demo showning possible usage of 'mefa' objects
mefadocs("ChangeLog")      ## Browse version history
mefaweb()                  ## Check out website for resources
vignette("mefa-vignette")  ## Open vignette