Skip to contents

Extract the top most species-rich genera of any plant family

Source: R/topGen.R
topGen.Rd

Produces a CSV file listing the top most diverse genera of any target botanical family of vascular plants at Plants of the World Online (POWO).

Usage

topGen(family,
       limit = 10,
       verbose = TRUE,
       source = "wcvp",
       save = FALSE,
       dir = "results_topGen",
       filename = "output")

Arguments

family

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

limit

A defined numerical value to limit the most diverse genera to be selected within each plant family. The default is to select the top ten richest genera.

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_topGen 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)

topGen(family = "Lecythidaceae",
       limit = 10,
       save = FALSE,
       dir = "results_topGen",
       filename = "Lecythidaceae_top_ten")
} # }