The taxlist package: managing plant taxonomic lists in R

Biodivers Data J. 2018 May 2:(6):e23635. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.6.e23635. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Taxonomic lists are crucial elements of vegetation-plot databases and provide the links between original entries, reference taxon views and different taxon concepts. We introduce the R package taxlist in the context of object-oriented modelling for taxonomic lists. This package provides a data structure based on species lists in Turboveg, which is a software broadly used for the storage of vegetation-plot databases and implements functions for importing and handling them prior to statistical analysis. We also present a schema for relational databases, compatible with taxlist objects and recommend its use for handling diversity records.

Keywords: Turboveg; database; ecoinformatics; taxon concept; taxon view; vegtable.