sep.sppinfo {CTFS}R Documentation

Creates a Vector of Species Characteristics for each Tree in a Dataset

Description

sep.sppinfo creates a vector of the same length as the input data file that contains a categorical value that can be found in the bcispp.info data file. This vector can be used with mortality, growth, recruitment, abundance and other functions to provide for dynamic rates for growth form, family, etc. This function can also be used as a template for writing other functions that use "table-lookup": using a key variable from the data file to look up the value of a column on a table file based on the row with the key variable value.

Usage

sep.sppinfo(census1, table.in, by.col = "grform")

Arguments

census1 usually a tree data file which is a dataframe, but any object with a dim=NULL is also allowed
table.in table file, must be a data.frame and is usually the species information file e.g. bcispp.info
by.col the column name of the variable that is to be used for classifying the trees into groups.

Details

The table.in file must contain a variable with the same name as a varible on the \census1 file. The table.in file is composed of rows of species with information about each species, including growth form. The species name of the tree from the census1 is used to locate a row in table.in and then the value returned is the column with the growth formm.

This function is usually used to create a vector of species names for each tree in a census file. However, it can also be used, usually within another function, to generate a vector of species from a vector of species names values. This usage can make such code much more simple as the cut function, labels and class limits are handled by sep.spp.info.

Note that this function can be used to extract any value from bcispp.info for grouping trees. More variables can be added to bcispp.info for grouping trees.

Value

sep.sppinfo returns a vector of values. The mode of the value depends on what column is extracted from table.in.

Author(s)

Pamela Hall

See Also

CTFS.utilities, CTFS.quadfunctions, CTFS.datafiles

Examples

## Not run: 
# 1. Default use of sep.sppinfo
grform.vct <- sep.sppinfo(tst.bci90.full,bcispp.info)

# 2. User defined column "family", then used as a split vector in 
growth()
fam.vct <- sep.sppinfo(tst.bci90.full,bcispp.info,by="fam")
growth.fam.out <- growth("tst.bci90.full",split1=fam.vct)

# 3. Using a vector of species names
grform1.vct <-sep.sppinfo(tst.bci90.full$sp,bcispp.info)

## End(Not run)

[Package CTFS version 1.00 Index]