The taxlist package: managing plant taxonomic lists in R

Abstract

Taxonomic lists are crucial elements of vegetation-plot databases and provide the links between original entries, reference taxon views and different taxon concepts. We introduce the R package taxlist in the context of object-oriented modelling for taxonomic lists. This package provides a data structure based on species lists in Turboveg, which is a software broadly used for the storage of vegetation-plot databases and implements functions for importing and handling them prior to statistical analysis. We also present a schema for relational databases, compatible with taxlist objects and recommend its use for handling diversity records.