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APCalign

‘APCalign’ uses the Australian Plant Census (APC) and Australian Plant Name Index to align and update Australian plant taxon name strings. ‘APCalign’ also supplies information about the established status (native/introduced) of plant taxa across different states/territories.

Installation

For Windows and Linux:


# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("traitecoevo/APCalign", dependencies = TRUE, upgrade = "ask")

for MacOS there is currently an extra line needed to install a working binary of the arrow dependency from r-universe instead of CRAN:


# install.packages("arrow", repos = c('https://apache.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))
# remotes::install_github("traitecoevo/APCalign", dependencies = TRUE, upgrade = "ask")

A quick demo

Generating a look-up table can be done with just one function:


library(APCalign)

create_taxonomic_update_lookup( 
  taxa = c(
    "Banksia integrifolia",
    "Acacia longifolia",
    "Commersonia rosea"
    )
)
#> Checking alignments of 3 taxa
#> Loading resources into memory...
#> ================================================================================================================================================================
#> ...done
#>   -> of these 2 names have a perfect match to a scientific name in the APC. Alignments being sought for remaining names.
#> # A tibble: 3 × 12
#>   original_name       aligned_name accepted_name suggested_name genus taxon_rank
#>   <chr>               <chr>        <chr>         <chr>          <chr> <chr>     
#> 1 Banksia integrifol… Banksia int… Banksia inte… Banksia integ… Bank… species   
#> 2 Acacia longifolia   Acacia long… Acacia longi… Acacia longif… Acac… species   
#> 3 Commersonia rosea   Commersonia… Androcalva r… Androcalva ro… Andr… species   
#> # ℹ 6 more variables: taxonomic_dataset <chr>, taxonomic_status <chr>,
#> #   scientific_name <chr>, aligned_reason <chr>, update_reason <chr>,
#> #   number_of_collapsed_taxa <dbl>

if you’re going to use APCalign more than once, it will save you time to load the taxonomic resources into memory first:


tax_resources <- load_taxonomic_resources()
#> Loading resources into memory...
#> ================================================================================================================================================================
#> ...done

create_taxonomic_update_lookup( 
  taxa = c(
    "Banksia integrifolia",
    "Acacia longifolia",
    "Commersonia rosea",
    "not a species"
    ),
  resources = tax_resources
)
#> Checking alignments of 4 taxa
#>   -> of these 2 names have a perfect match to a scientific name in the APC. Alignments being sought for remaining names.
#> # A tibble: 4 × 12
#>   original_name       aligned_name accepted_name suggested_name genus taxon_rank
#>   <chr>               <chr>        <chr>         <chr>          <chr> <chr>     
#> 1 Banksia integrifol… Banksia int… Banksia inte… Banksia integ… Bank… species   
#> 2 Acacia longifolia   Acacia long… Acacia longi… Acacia longif… Acac… species   
#> 3 Commersonia rosea   Commersonia… Androcalva r… Androcalva ro… Andr… species   
#> 4 not a species       <NA>         <NA>          <NA>           <NA>  <NA>      
#> # ℹ 6 more variables: taxonomic_dataset <chr>, taxonomic_status <chr>,
#> #   scientific_name <chr>, aligned_reason <chr>, update_reason <chr>,
#> #   number_of_collapsed_taxa <dbl>

Checking for Australian natives:


native_anywhere_in_australia(c("Eucalyptus globulus","Pinus radiata"), resources = tax_resources)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 2
#>   species             native_anywhere_in_aus
#>   <chr>               <chr>                 
#> 1 Eucalyptus globulus native                
#> 2 Pinus radiata       introduced

Shiny application

We also developed a shiny application for non-R users to update and align their taxonomic names. You can find the application here: https://unsw.shinyapps.io/APCalign-app

Learn more

Highly recommend looking at our Getting Started vignette to learn about how to use ‘APCalign’. You can also learn more about our taxa matching algorithm.

Found a bug?

Did you come across an unexpected taxon name change? Elusive error you can’t debug - submit an issue and we will try our best to help

Comments and contributions

We welcome any comments and contributions to the package, start by submit an issue and we can take it from there!