lc50_read: Read Bioassay Data for LC Estimation

In insectecol: Insect Ecology Data Analysis Toolkit

Read Bioassay Data for LC Estimation

Description

Reads the raw csv files of a dose-response bioassay (one file per insecticide, population or similar) and returns a list of standardised data frames that the LC functions of the package work with.

Usage

lc50_read(path = NULL)

Arguments

path	Character string; the data path: a folder (all csv files inside are read) or a single csv file. If NULL (the default), a folder selection dialog is opened.

Details

Each csv file must contain one row per concentration with three required columns: the concentration, the number of insects tested and the number of dead insects. The column names are matched loosely against the fixed keywords of the csv template, so headers with additional text such as units (e.g. a concentration header with "(mg/L)" appended) are recognised as well. Rows with a concentration of zero are treated as the control group and are used for the Abbott correction during the analysis.

The data are standardised and validated while reading: rows with non-numeric or missing entries are dropped, the number of tested insects must be positive, the number of dead insects must lie between zero and the number of tested insects, at least one concentration greater than zero must be present, and the rows are sorted by increasing concentration. The file encoding is detected automatically (UTF-8 with BOM and GBK are tried), so files written by both English and Chinese versions of 'Excel' can be read.

Value

A named list with one data frame per csv file; the list elements are named after the files (without extension) and each data frame has the columns Concentration, Tested and Dead.

References

Abbott, W. S. (1925) A method of computing the effectiveness of an insecticide. Journal of Economic Entomology 18(2), 265-267.

See Also

lc50_calculate for the analysis workflow, check_path_type for the path handling.

Examples

f <- system.file("extdata", "lc50_example.csv", package = "insectecol")
lcd <- lc50_read(f)
lcd$bioassay
if (interactive()) lcd <- lc50_read()   # interactive folder dialog

insectecol documentation built on Oct. 5, 2026, 5:08 p.m.