2 May 2011

Import dbf to R, Manipulate Strings with grep & sub Function

Here's a set of historical species presence records of a certain geographical region (data-link). I wanted to manipulate / simplify strings (species names) and get an overview of the data. 
...The tasks were to split genera and epitheta, to exclude species with specific strings included and to get rid of unwanted text (author names). For graphical presentation of the species record history I did a plot with segments indicating the first and last year of a species record: