funspace: an R package to build, analyze and plot functional trait spaces

Functional trait space analyses are pivotal to describe and compare organisms’ functional diversity across the tree of life. Yet, there is no single application that streamlines the many sometimes-troublesome steps needed to build and analyze functional trait spaces.
To fill this gap, we propose funspace, an R package to easily handle bivariate and multivariate (PCA-based) functional trait space analyses. The six functions that constitute the package can be grouped in three modules: ‘Building and exploring’, ‘Mapping’, and ‘Plotting’. The building and exploring module defines the main features of a functional trait space (e.g., functional diversity metrics) by leveraging kernel density-based methods. The mapping module uses general additive models to map how a target variable distributes within a trait space. The plotting module provides many options for creating flexible and high-quality figures representing the outputs obtained from previous modules. We provide a worked example to dem..., , , # funspace - Creating and representing functional trait spaces

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Estimation of functional spaces based on traits of organisms. The package includes functions to impute missing trait values (with or without considering phylogenetic information), and to create, represent and analyse two dimensional functional spaces based on principal components analysis, other ordination methods, or raw traits. It also allows for mapping a third variable onto the functional space.

## Description of the Data and file structure

We provide the package as a .tar file (filename: funspace_0.1.1.tar). Once the package has been downloaded, it can be directly uploaded in R from Packages >> Install >> Install from >> Package Archive File (.zip, .tar.gz). All the functions and example datasets included in funspace and that are necessary to reproduce the worked example in the paper will be automatically uploaded. Functions and example datasets can be then accessed using the standard syntax fu...