mama: A (convenience) wrapper function to make matrix from a data.frame
Description
The function mama uses reshape
to transpose species data given in database list format (where each line
represents a species in a plot, so the list has three columns containing
information on plot, species and information on occurence) into a plot
species matrix (where rows represent plots and columns represent species)
for further use with other functions on vegetational data.
Usage
mama(dat, spl = TRUE)
Arguments
dat
Species data in list format. The columns have to represent plot, species, occurence information (presence/absence or abundances). Column names may differ but they must be in that order! The last column can be missing when these are presence/absence data
spl
Logical. If TRUE (default) mama assumes that the input is species data and formats the output accordingly
Value
Returns a data.frame which contains the presence/absence or abundance data of the species list. Rows represent plots, columns represent species. If you want to have it vice versa you have to use the function on a list with columns species, plots, occurrence information (in that order).
encoding
UTF-8
Details
You could reach the same result with reshape. I was just always quite confused with this. That's why i decided to do this little wrapper for convenience. It needs quite a while to run though, but this is due to reshape.
data(abis)
abis.spcls <- liste(abis.spec, splist=TRUE)
## see the list, it like what you get from a database## and return to matrix-format:abis.test <- mama(abis.spcls)