SPECIES: An R Package for Species Richness Estimation

Abstract

We introduce an R package SPECIES for species richness or diversity estimation. This package provides simple R functions to compute point and confidence interval estimates of species number from a few nonparametric and semi-parametric methods. For the methods based on nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation, the R functions are wrappers for Fortran codes for better efficiency. All functions in this package are illustrated using real data sets.

Keywords

• coverage
• Jackknife
• nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation
• R software
• species problem
• species richness estimation