R: Simulations to Explore Relationships Between Functional...
simul.dbFD
R Documentation
Simulations to Explore Relationships Between Functional Diversity Indices
Description
simul.dbFD generates artificial communities of species with artificial functional traits. Different functional diversity (FD) indices are computed from these communities using dbFD to explore their inter-relationships.
vector listing the different levels of species richness used in the simulations
t
number of traits
r
number of replicates per species richness level
p
number of species in the common species pool
tr.method
character string indicating the sampling distribution for the traits. "unif" is a uniform distribution, "norm" is a normal distribution, and "lnorm" is a lognormal distribution.
abun.method
character string indicating the sampling distribution for the species abundances. Same as for tr.method.
w.abun
logical; should FDis, FEve, FDiv, and Rao's quadratic entropy (Q) be weighted by species abundances?
Value
A list contaning the following elements:
results
data frame containing the results of the simulations
traits
matrix containing the traits
abun
matrix containing the abundances
abun.gamma
species abundances from the pooled set of communities
FDis.gamma
FDis of the pooled set of communities
FDis.mean
mean FDis from all communities
FDis.gamma and FDis.mean can be used to explore the set concavity criterion (Ricotta 2005) for FDis.
A graph plotting the results of the simulations is also returned.
Warning
The simulations performed by simul.dbFD can take several hours if length(s) and/or r is large. Run a test with the default parameters first.