README.md

In jacob-ogre/USNVC: Package for the United States National Vegetation Classification

USNVC

An R package for the U.S. National Vegetation Classification (NVC) database.

The U.S. National Vegetation Classification (NVC) is a standardized, hierarchical classification system for vegetation in the United States. (It is aptly named.) The NVC standards were developed by a partnership of agencies (e.g., USDA Forest Service and US Geological Survey), professional organizations (e.g., the Ecological Society of America), and non-profits (e.g., NatureServe). The full NVC database, which can be downloaded here, contains 18 tables with information on 8,192 vegetation categories, ranging in scope from seven very broad Classes to >4,000 highly refined Associations.

NOTE: It's not clear how I ever got to the data download URL...but as of 10 Aug 2016, the link still works and the download has the same MD5 hash (cfe77e3187783ed7c5f7f3d3118a45cb) as the version in this package.

Installation

USNVC isn't on CRAN, and may not be for some time because the data is too big for a CRAN package. Instead of install.packages, you'll have to use devtools to install with:

devtools::install_github("jacob-ogre/USNVC")

To get the most out of the data, you'll need the igraph package.

NVC as a network

Because the NVC is fundamentally a network, USNVC includes a join of the database tables Unit and UnitDescription represented as an igraph network. Several of the functions depend on igraph, and can be readily extended using that package. Last, some helper functions are available for plotting with visNetwork, which seems to work really well.

Feedback

Have a question or comment about this package? Either submit a pull request or contact us.

jacob-ogre/USNVC documentation built on May 18, 2019, 8 a.m.