vegan (version 1.6-2)

make.cepnames: Abbreviates a Botanical or Zoological Latin Name into an Eight-character Name

Description

A standard CEP name has four first letters of the generic name and four first letters of the specific epithet of a Latin name. The last epithet, that may be a subspecific name, is used in the current function. The returned names are made unique with function make.unique which adds numbers to the end of CEP names if needed.

Usage

make.cepnames(names)

Arguments

names

The names to be formatted into CEP names.

Value

• Function returns CEP names.

Details

Cornell Ecology Programs (CEP) used eight-letter abbreviations for species and site names. In species, the names were formed by taking four first letters of the generic name and four first letters of the specific or subspecific epithet. The CEP names were originally used, because old FORTRAN IV did not have CHARACTER data type, but text variables had to be stored into numerical variables, which in popular computers could hold four characters. In modern times, there is no reason for this limitation, but ecologists are used to these names, and they may be practical to avoid congestion in ordination plots.

See Also

make.names, strsplit, substring, paste.

Examples

make.cepnames(c("Aa maderoi", "Poa sp.", "Cladina rangiferina",
"Cladonia cornuta", "Cladonia cornuta var. groenlandica",
"Cladonia rangiformis"))
data(BCI)
colnames(BCI) <- make.cepnames(colnames(BCI))