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The package

The letsR package is being developed to help researchers handle, process, and analyze macroecological data. It aims to integrate these methodological processes into a single software platform for macroecological analyses. The package’s main functions allow users to build presence-absence matrices, the primary analytical tool in macroecology, from species’ geographical distributions and merge them with species’ traits, conservation information and spatial environmental layers. In addition, other packages’ functions enable users to summarize and visualize data from presence-absence matrices.

All functions in this package use a prefix and a suffix separated by a dot; the prefix refers to the package’s name, and the suffix to the actual function. This nomenclature avoids confusion with potentially similarly-named functions from other R packages. For instance, the letsR function used to create presence-absence matrices is called lets.presab (but see also lets.presab.birds and lets.presab.points), whereas the one used to add variables to a presence-absence matrix is called lets.addvar.
The package’s primary functions create and work on a particular S3 object class called PresenceAbsence. Such PresenceAbsence object class allows storing information beyond presence-absence data (e.g. user-defined grid-cell system) and using the generic plot, summary and print functions of R. Also, some package’s functions allow the user to input customary R objects (e.g. vector, matrix, data.frame).

The letsR package is in continuous development, and suggestions are more than welcome!

We hope you enjoy it and find it helpful.

Install

Install letsR from CRAN

install.packages("letsR")
library("letsR")

Install letsR developers version from github

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("macroecology/letsR")
library(letsR)

OBS.: To download the developers version you will need to have the git software installed (https://git-scm.com/). If you are a windows user you will also need to download the Rtools (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/).

Note

Due to changes in the IUCN API and limitations in data distribution established by IUCN terms of use, we are no longer maintaining the functions lets.iucn, lets.iucn.hist and lets.iucn.ha. These functions will be removed from the package in the next version. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.