Holdridge points

Source: R/bioclimate.R

Calculates the values of bioclimatic indices from monthly temperature and precipitation measurements, following Szelepcsényi et al. 2014.

bioclimate(temp, prec)

Arguments

temp

A matrix or data frame with 12 columns containing temperatures, in degrees C, for each month of the calendar year.

prec

A matrix or data frame with the same dimensions as temp, containing precipitation measurements in mm for each month of the year.

Value

bioclimate() returns a data.frame whose columns correspond to:

  • abt, mean annual biotemperature; mean annual temperature after replacing entries outside the range 0° to 30° with zeros;

  • tap, total annual precipitation (mm);

  • per, potential evapotranspiration ratio;

  • zone, name of associated holdridge zone

References

Szelepcsényi Z, Breuer H, Sümegi P (2014) The climate of Carpathian Region in the 20th century based on the original and modified Holdridge life zone system. Cent Eur J Geosci 6, 293–307. doi:10.2478/s13533-012-0189-5

Holdridge L. R. (1959) Simple method for determining potential evapotranspiration from temperature data. Science, 130, 572. doi:10.1126/science.130.3375.572

Author

Martin R. Smith

Examples

# Step 1. Import the Italian Biome polygon data
# Step 2. Run the download function
# Step 3. Run the extract function
#* See ce_download & ce_extract documentation

# Steps 1, 2 & 3 can be skipped by loading the extracted data (it_data)
data("it_data", package = "climenv")

bioclimate(it_data$tavg_m[, 1:12], it_data$prec_m[, 1:12])
#>          abt      tap      per                     zone
#> MED 15.64183 625.9886 1.472508 Tropical very dry forest
#> NEM 12.02788 841.7425 0.842066   Subtropical dry forest