Lowest common taxon of a set of names

Resolves the names and reports the deepest Linnaean rank at which they all share one classification value – their most recent common ancestor in the backbone's hierarchy. Two congeners return their shared genus; two plants in different families return a shared order or class; unrelated taxa share only a kingdom (or nothing).

Usage

lowest_common(x, backbone = NULL, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

x

Character vector of names (two or more), or a taxify() result.

backbone

Backend passed to taxify() when x is raw names. NULL (default) uses every installed backbone. Ignored when x is a result.

verbose

Logical. Default TRUE.

Value

A one-row data.frame with columns rank, name (the shared taxon), and n_taxa (how many resolved names went into the comparison). rank and name are NA when the taxa share nothing (e.g. different kingdoms, or only one resolved).

See also

class2tree(), add_classification(), taxify().

Examples

# Runs offline against the bundled example database.
old <- options(taxify.data_dir = taxify_example_data())

lowest_common(c("Quercus robur", "Quercus petraea"))

options(old)