Extract megadiverse genera of any plant family

Produces a CSV file listing all mega-diverse genera for any plant family at Plants of the World Online (POWO) based on a provided numeric value as the threshold to be considered mega-diverse. Frodin (2004) suggests 500 species as the threshold.

Usage

megaGen(family,
        thld = 500,
        verbose = TRUE,
        source = "wcvp",
        save = FALSE,
        dir = "results_megaGen",
        filename = "output")

Arguments

family

Either one family name or a vector of multiple families that is present in POWO.

thld

A defined threshold of species number for a genus to be considered megadiverse. The default value is 500 based on Frodin (2004).

verbose

Logical, if FALSE, a message showing each step during the POWO search will not be printed in the console in full.

source

Data source to be mined. The default "wcvp" uses the bulk data of the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), the taxonomic backbone of POWO, which is downloaded once from Kew and cached on disk (see tools::R_user_dir("expowo", "cache")). It is refreshed only when Kew releases a new WCVP version. Use "powo" to mine the source page of each taxon at the POWO website instead, which is much slower and may be blocked by POWO.

save

Logical, if TRUE, the search results will be saved on disk.

dir

Pathway to the computer's directory, where the file will be saved provided that the argument save is set up in TRUE. The default is to create a directory named results_megaGen and the search results will be saved within a subfolder named after the current date.

filename

Name of the output file to be saved. The default is to create a file entitled output.

Value

A table with the following fields: family, genus, authors, scientific_name, species_number (counting of species within each genus), kew_id (each genus code within Kew's databases), powo_uri (URI to access each genus in POWO).

See also

POWOcodes

Author

Debora Zuanny & Domingos Cardoso

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{

library(expowo)

megaGen(family = "Cyperaceae",
        thld = 500,
        save = FALSE,
        dir = "results_megaGen",
        filename = "Cyperaceae_big_genera")
} # }