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biomonitoR

The package biomonitoR allow easy calculation of several biomonitoring indices. The actual version of biomonitoR is intended for macroinvertebrate only, but future version will allow the indices caluclation also for other groups (e.g. macrophytes).

The core function of the package is asBiomonitor, that performs the merge between the user dataframe and the reference database. The main features of the asBiomonitoR function are:

• the user has to provide a data.frame with the first column called "Taxa", which contains the names of the recovered taxa, and the other columns with the abundance of collected organisms in the studied sites. The column taxa can contain an heterogeneus list of taxa (e.g. species, genus and family mixed together);
• the actual version of biomonitoR heavily rely on the freshwaterecology.info database, used to build the reference database;
• at first asBiomonitor compare the taxalist provided by the user with the one present in the default reference dataset. Correct names are suggested in case the user' taxalist contains wrong names.
• ATTENTION!!! asBiomonitor does not check for synonyms! If suggested names does not satisfy your expectation you have to edit the data.frame by hand or to provide a custom reference database to add (or replace) to the default reference database.
• Hydracarina, Hydracnidia and Acariformes are replaced by default with Trombidiformes.