Processing Ecological Data in R with the mefa Package

Abstract

mefa is an R package for multivariate data handling in ecology and biogeography. It provides object classes to represent the data coded by samples, taxa and segments (i.e., subpopulations, repeated measures). It supports easy processing of the data along with relational data tables for samples and taxa. An object of class mefa is a project specific compendium of the dataset and can be easily used in further analyses. Methods are provided for extraction, aggregation, conversion, plotting, summary and reporting of mefa objects. Reports can be generated in plain text or LaTex. This paper presents worked examples on a variety of ecological analyses.