icosa

The primary problem with ecological samples is that due to density and uniformity issues, the data points are to be aggregated to distinct units. As coordinate recording is very efficient on the 2d surface of a polarcoordinate system (i.e. latitude and longitude data), this was primarly achieved by rectangular gridding of thesurface (for instance 1°×1°grid cells). Unfortunately, this method suffers from systematic biasing effects: as the poles are approached, the cells become smaller in area, and come closer together.

The icosa package approaches this problem from one of the most straightforward ways, by tessellation of aregular icosahedron to a given resolution. This procedure ends up with a polyhedral object of triangular facesof higly isometric properties: very similar shapes of cells which are roughly equally distanced, and similar in-cell area.

Installation from CRAN

You can install the most up-to-date CRAN version with the following R command.

install.packages("icosa")

Once the installation has been completed, you can attach the package to be used in R.

library(icosa)