A “count” object is a list of species together with
their abundance. It also has class “table”; compare
“census” objects.
An object of class “count” is a table sorted from most to least
abundant species. The singletons are thus tabulated last.
Function count()
takes a vector, the elements of which are
interpreted as abundances. If any of the elements are named, the
names are interpreted as species names (unnamed elements are given the
null name). If the vector is unnamed, then the species names are
upper case letters, with the first element being named
“A
”, the second “B
”, and so on; this
behaviour is inherited from as.table()
. Note that this means
that the species names are not necessarily in alphabetical order.
From version 1.6-9, zero elements are interpreted as zero abundance
species (ie extinct).
To access or change species names, use names()
and
names<-
respectively.
Function as.count()
coerces its argument to count form.