An R package for mining species list, diversity estimates, and distribution data for any genus or family of vascular plants from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) available through RBG Kew’s Plants of the World Online (POWO).
The main goal of the expowo package is to retrieve
information about the diversity and distribution of any plant family as
publicly available at the taxonomically verified database Plants of the World Online
(POWO). The package is intended to efficiently mine the content
inside the source HTML pages for any specific genus and family. It can
return a comma-separated values (CSV) file with the number of accepted
species and country-level distribution for any genus as well as the full
list of accepted species in any genus or family, their authorship,
original publication and global distribution. The latests functions
implemented, powoMap and accGraph, are
available in the GitHub version and can automatically create global maps
for any taxon level and accumulation graphics of species discovery,
respectively.
Please make sure you have installed the latest versions of both R (Mac OS, Windows) and RStudio (Mac OS / Windows: choose the free version).
You can install expowo from CRAN by just running the following R code:
install.packages("expowo")library(expowo)Otherwise, you can install the latest development version of expowo from GitHub using the devtools package with the following R code:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("DBOSlab/expowo")library(expowo)OBS.: To download the development version, you will need to have the Git software installed. And if your operating system is Microsoft Windows, you will also need to download the Rtools.
The package’s major functions (powoFam,
powoGenera, powoSpecies,
powoSpDist, megaGen, and topGen)
only require the name of the target family (or a vector with multiple
family names). These major functions work with other minor functions
(getInfo and saveCSV), with auxiliary and
defensive functions to mine the plant data. Respectively,
getInfo mines the taxonomic information of each genus, the
total number of species within any genus, and does a complete search for
native and introduced country-level distribution for any genus and
species, while saveCSV fastly writes CSV files within the
current date subfolder of a provided specific directory. With these
extracted distributions, it is also possible to automatically generate
global maps according to political country and botanical countries with
the function powoMap. Additionally, if you want to plot new
species discoveries within any genus after downloading the data using
powoSpecies, it is also possible to do it automatically
using accGraph. See the examples on how to use the
expowo’s functions for mining and using data regarding
the global plant diversity and distribution in the ‘Articles’ section in
our site.
A detailed description of the expowo’s full functionality is available here.
The expowo package is being continuously constructed. If you want to make suggestions, let us know! We hope it will be helpful for your botanical research!
Zuanny, D. C., B. Vilela, P. W. Moonlight, T. E. Särkinen, and D. Cardoso. 2024. expowo: An R package for mining global plant diversity and distribution data. Applications in Plant Sciences 12: e11609. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.11609
