Mining distribution for any plant species

Here in this article, we show how to use the package’s function powoSpDist for mining the entire distribution for any species of flowering plants. The powoSpDist uses the argument species to set the name or list of species names, and then the function access the auxiliary functions getGenURI and getDist to catch their respective distribution.


Setup

Install the latest development version of expowo from GitHub:

#install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("DBOSlab/expowo")
library(expowo)


Mining the distribution for any angiosperm species

The function powoSpDist returns a dataframe or saves a CSV file listing the entire global distribution at country or botanical level for any of the given species scientific name(s) (excluding hybrid species), their genus, publication and authorship. The global classification of botanical divisions follows the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions, which is already associated with each taxon’s distribution in the POWO.

The example below shows how to mine the distribution for a specified vector of two species. The output shown here (a table) is simplified by removing the family and distribution according to botanical subdivision columns.

BL_dist <- powoSpDist(family = c("Begoniaceae", "Lecythidaceae"),
                      species = c("Hillebrandia sandwicensis", "Lecythis pisonis"),
                      verbose = TRUE,
                      save = FALSE,
                      dir = "results_powoSpDist/",
                      filename = "Begoniaceae_Lecythidaceae")
TABLE 1. A general powoSpDist search for mining distribution of two angiosperm species.
family taxon_name authors publication native_to_country introduced_to_country kew_id
Lecythidaceae Lecythis pisonis Cambess. A.F.C.P.de Saint-Hilaire & al., Fl. Bras. Merid. 2: 377 (1833) Brazil, Colombia, Peru Trinidad-Tobago 597315-1
Begoniaceae Hillebrandia sandwicensis Oliv. Trans. Linn. Soc. London 25: 361 (1866) United States unknown 106195-1


Mining distribution for all angiosperm species

To mine the distribution checklist for all accepted species of flowering plants, you can load the dataframe-formatted data object called POWOcodes that comes associated with the expowo package. The POWOcodes data object already contains the URI addresses for all angiosperms families recognized in the POWO database, you just need to call it to your R environment.

The example below shows how to mine the global distribution of all accepted non hybrid species of flowering plants by using the vector of all angiosperm families and associated URI addresses stored in the POWOcodes object. Note that the argument species should be as NULL, so that the search is not constrained to any particular species, i.e. the function will return global distribution for all species in all queried families.

data(POWOcodes)

ALL_dist <- powoSpDist(POWOcodes$family,
                       species = NULL,
                       verbose = TRUE,
                       save = FALSE,
                       dir = "results_powoSpDist/",
                       filename = "all_angiosperm_distribution")