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iPastoralist

An R package for vegetation data analysis, phytopastoral assessment, and phytosociological classification.

iPastoralist provides tools for processing, analyzing, and classifying plant communities, with particular emphasis on grassland and pasture vegetation.

The package supports botanical data collected using both point-quadrat (point-intercept) and phytosociological survey methods, integrating biodiversity assessment, ecological indicators, pastoral evaluation, and numerical vegetation classification.

Main features

1. Vegetation data preparation and conversion

  • Point-quadrat data processing: convert species frequency of occurrence into relative abundance and estimated percentage cover, including optional treatment of occasional species (vegetation_abundance()).
  • Phytosociological data conversion: transform visually estimated species cover into Braun-Blanquet, Van der Maarel, and numerical cover-abundance scales (PhytoCover()).

2. Vegetation characterization

  • Biodiversity assessment: calculate species richness, Shannon diversity, Effective Number of Species, and evenness (biodiversity()).
  • Pastoral Value: assess the forage potential of grassland and pasture vegetation (pastoral_value()).
  • Ecological indicator values: calculate Ellenberg and Landolt community-level indices, with optional abundance weighting (ecological_indexes()).
  • Floristic composition: extract the most abundant species for individual vegetation surveys (first_ten_species()).

3. Vegetation classification and interpretation

iPastoralist provides tools supporting numerical vegetation classification and the characterization of resulting vegetation groups.

Main functionalities include:

  • Numerical classification: identify vegetation groups based on floristic similarity.
  • Classification evaluation: compare alternative partitions and support the selection of the number of vegetation groups.
  • Species characterization: identify diagnostic, constant, dominant, and companion species.
  • Synoptic vegetation tables: summarize species frequencies and floristic differences among vegetation groups.
  • Phytopastoral interpretation: characterize grassland and pasture types according to their botanical composition, ecological properties, and pastoral characteristics.
  • Phytosociological interpretation: support the identification and comparison of vegetation units and their possible attribution to established syntaxonomic schemes.

These tools facilitate reproducible vegetation classification workflows, combining numerical analyses with ecological and expert-based interpretation.

Installation

Install iPastoralist directly from GitHub using the pak package:

```r id=“m0vzq8” # Install pak (if needed) install.packages(“pak”)

Install iPastoralist

pak::pak(“MarcoPittarello/iPastoralist”)

Load the package

library(iPastoralist) ```

Documentation

Detailed descriptions of the functions, methodological explanations, and examples are available in the package documentation.

Author

Marco Pittarello

License

GPL-3