Open Accessfunrar: An R package to characterize functional rarity
Author(s) -
Grenié Matthias,
Denelle Pierre,
Tucker Caroline M.,
Munoz François,
Violle Cyrille
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
diversity and distributions
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.918
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1472-4642
pISSN - 1366-9516
DOI - 10.1111/ddi.12629
Subject(s) - functional diversity , macroecology , r package , ecology , trait , biology , biogeography , evolutionary biology , computer science , computational science , programming language
Emphasis has been put in recent ecological research on investigating phylogenetic, functional and taxonomic facets of biological diversity. While a flourishing number of indices have been proposed for assessing functional diversity, surprisingly few options are available to characterize functional rarity. Functional rarity can play a key role in community and ecosystem dynamics. We introduce here the funrar R package to quantify functional rarity based on species trait differences and species frequencies at local and regional scales. Because of the increasing availability of big datasets in macroecology and biogeography, we optimized funrar to work with large datasets of thousands of species and sites. We illustrate the use of the package to investigate the functional rarity of North and Central American mammals.