In guillembagaria/ggbiome: Obtain and Plot Whittaker's Biome Information

ggbiome provides functions to obtain mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation and Whittaker's biome type from geographical coordinates, and to plot locations over the biome diagram.

Get data functions

These functions are intended to obtain data and create objects to be plotted. They involve creating a spatial object of Whittaker's biomes, and downloading climatic data and obtaining the biome using geographical coordinates.

`gd_get_biomes_spdf`

It returns a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object of the Whittaker's biomes modified by Ricklefs (2008) in function of mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation.

`gd_get_biome`

This function takes a data frame with geographical coordinates or climatic data and returns the same data frame with extra columns of climatic data (if not provided) and biome. It also accepts single values for both latitude and longitude, or both mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation. Climatic data is obtained from WorldClim 1.4 using the RFc package.

Visualization functions

The aim of these functions is to produce biome diagrams. They plot either a diagram of the spatial object of the Whittaker's biomes, or site locations over the same diagram.

`vis_biome`

This function produces a ggplot object of the Whittaker's biomes from a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object obtained with gd_get_biomes_spdf. It shows each biome as a colored area according to mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation.

`vis_location_biome`

It produces a ggplot object showing the Whittaker's biomes as colored areas according to mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation using the function vis_biome, and adds sites on it according to their climatic values, obtained using the function gd_get_biome if not provided.

Usage

Obtaining climatic and biome type data

gd_get_biome expects either a data frame with site coordinates or climatic data (indicating column names for columns that contain this data), or values of both latitude (si_lat) and longitude (si_long) in decimal degrees, or both mean annual temperature (si_mat) in degrees Celsiu and mean annual precipitation (si_map) in millimeters. It returns a data frame with the original data and extra columns of mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation (if not provided) and biome:

# Load package
library(ggbiome)

# Create a data frame with coordinates
sites <- data.frame(site = c("A", "B"), lat = c(69.49, 41.43),
                    long = c(27.23, 2.07))

# Get temperature, precipitation and biomes
gd_get_biome(sites, si_lat = "lat", si_long = "long")

# Alternatively, for one site
gd_get_biome(si_mat = 15.8, si_map = 622)

Plotting locations over the biome diagram

vis_location_biome expects the same input as gd_get_biome, and returns a ggplot object showing the biomes with sites over it:

# Create a ggplot diagram of the biomes with sites
vis_location_biome(sites, si_lat = "lat", si_long = "long",
                   point_labels = sites$site)

# Alternatively, for one site
vis_location_biome(si_mat = 15.8, si_map = 622, col_fill = 'red')