phylospatial: Create a spatial phylogenetic object

In phylospatial: Spatial Phylogenetic Analysis

Create a spatial phylogenetic object

Description

This function creates a phylospatial object. This is the core data type in the phylospatial library, and is a required input to most other functions in the package. The two essential components of a spatial phylogenetic object are a phylogenetic tree and an community data set.

Usage

phylospatial(
  comm,
  tree = NULL,
  spatial = NULL,
  data_type = c("auto", "probability", "binary", "abundance", "other"),
  clade_fun = NULL,
  build = TRUE,
  check = TRUE,
  area_tol = 0.01
)

Arguments

comm	Community data representing the distribution of terminal taxa across sites. Can be a matrix with a column per terminal and a row per site, a SpatRaster with one layer per terminal, or a sf data with a column per terminal. Taxa whose names do not match between column/layer names in comm and tip labels in tree will be dropped with a warning (unless build = FALSE).
tree	Phylogeny of class phylo. Terminals whose names do not match comm will be dropped with a warning (unless build = FALSE). If this argument is not provided, terminals are assumed to follow a "star" tree with uniform branch lengths, which will lead to non-phylogenetic versions of any analyses done with the resulting phylospatial object. Must be a rooted tree.
spatial	An optional SpatRaster layer or sf object indicating site locations. The number of cells or rows must match comm. Ignored if comm is a SpatRaster or sf object.
data_type	Character giving the data type of comm. Must be "binary", "probability", "abundance", "auto" (the default), or "other". This determines how community values for clades are calculated from the values for terminal taxa. If "binary" (presence-absence), a clade is considered present in a site if any terminal in the clade is present. If "probability," clade probabilities are calculated as the probability that at least one terminal is present in a site. If "abundance," clade abundances are calculated as the sum of abundances for terminals in the clade in a site. If "auto," an attempt is made to guess which of these three data types was provided. This argument is ignored if clade_fun is provided, or if build = FALSE. If "other", a custom clade_fun must be supplied.
clade_fun	Function to calculate the local community weight for a clade based on community weights for tips found in a given location. Must be either NULL (the default, in which case the default function for the selected data_type is used) or a summary function that takes a numeric vector and returns a single numeric output. Ignored if comm already includes clade ranges.
build	Logical indicating whether comm already includes clade ranges that should be used instead of building new ones. Default is TRUE. If FALSE, clade_fun is ignored, no checks are performed to harmonize the tip labels and the community data, and the columns of comm must exactly match the order of tree edges including tips and larger clades. If clade ranges are included in comm but build = TRUE, they will be dropped and new clade ranges will be built.
check	Logical indicating whether community data should be validated. Default is TRUE.
area_tol	Numeric value giving tolerance for variation in the area of sites. Default is 0.01. If the coefficient of variation in the area or length of spatial units (e.g. grid cells) exceeds this value, an error will result. This check is performed because various other functions in the library assume that sites are equal area. This argument is ignored if check = FALSE or if no spatial data is provided.

Details

This function formats the input data as a phylospatial object. Beyond validating, cleaning, and restructing the data, the main operation it performs is to compute community occurrence data for every internal clade on the tree.

Unoccupied sites (rows where no taxon occurs) are automatically removed from the community matrix during construction to improve performance. The original site indices of occupied rows are stored in ps$occupied, and the total number of sites (including unoccupied) in ps$n_sites, enabling reconstruction of full-extent spatial outputs. Functions that return spatial results automatically expand occupied-only data back to the full spatial extent.

Value

A phylospatial object, which is a list containing the following elements:

"data_type":

Character indicating the community data type

"tree":

Phylogeny of class phylo

"comm":

Community matrix containing only occupied sites, including a column for every terminal taxon and every larger clade. Column order corresponds to tree edge order.

"spatial":

A SpatRaster or sf providing spatial coordinates for all sites (including unoccupied). May be missing if no spatial data was supplied.

"occupied":

Integer vector of row indices identifying which sites in the original data are occupied.

"n_sites":

Total number of sites in the original data, including unoccupied.

"dissim":

A community dissimilarity matrix of class dist indicating pairwise phylogenetic dissimilarity between occupied sites. Missing unless ps_add_dissim() is called.

Examples

# load species distribution data and phylogeny
comm <- terra::rast(system.file("extdata", "moss_comm.tif", package = "phylospatial"))
tree <- ape::read.tree(system.file("extdata", "moss_tree.nex", package = "phylospatial"))

# construct `phylospatial` object
ps <- phylospatial(comm, tree)
ps

phylospatial documentation built on April 4, 2026, 1:07 a.m.