Cornell Ecology Programs (CEP) introduced a popular data file format
for ecological community data, and this format was later adopted by
CANOCO software with small modifications. Many legacy data sets are
still written in these formats. The cepreader package provides
function readCEP() to read these data files into R as a
data.frame or a sparse Matrix. The function does not handle all
possible CEP formats, but it handles transposed condensed format
which was the most popular one plus some other popular formats.
The package has only function readCEP(). This function was earlier
included in the vegan package. However, the function is written in
FORTRAN, and FORTRAN input can interfere with other compiled code,
in particular in Windows. To minimize the risk of conflicts, reading
of CEP files was moved to a separate package. The CEP format can save
data in flexible forms as defined by a FORTRAN format specification
in the file, and this format is best interpreted using FORTRAN code.
The vegan package has function read.cep() that uses only R
code and can read many files written in transposed condensed format,
but this package is more versatile and robust and can handle a wider
array of CEP formats.
