The letsR package is being developed to help researchers in the handling, processing, and analysis of macroecological data. Its purpose is 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 basic analytical tool in macroecology, from species' geographical distributions and merge them with species' traits, conservation information (downloadable using functions from this package) and spatial environmental layers. In addition, other package's functions enable users to summarize and visualize information from presence-absence matrices.
Details
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 is done to avoid 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 basic 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).
Another set of functions in this package allow the user to download species' information related to
their description and conservation status as provided by the IUCN's REdList database (lets.iucn,
lets.iucn.ha, lets.iucn.his).
For this, such functions use the IUCN's RedList API to retrieve information from its webpage.
If you are looking for the most recent version of the package, you can get the development version of letsR on github (https://github.com/macroecology/letsR).
| Package: | lestR |
| Type: | Package |
| Version: | 3.1 |
| Date: | 2018-01-24 |
| License: | GPL-2 |
References
Vilela, B., & Villalobos, F. (2015). letsR: a new R package for data handling and analysis in macroecology. Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Author
Bruno Vilela
(email: bvilela@wustl.edu;
Website: https://bvilela.weebly.com/)
Fabricio Villalobos
(email: fabricio.villalobos@gmail.com;
Website: https://fabro.github.io)