Dear people on this list, I am a German PhD student in the field of arthropod palaeontology. I want to develop a new approach for comparing abundance data in a phylogenetic context. Unlike following the standard techniques of community ecology, I want to include the abundance data not only for the tips of a tree but also for its nodes. The background for this is, that in palaeontology it is often not possible to identify specimens to species level and also some fossils are better preserved as others, hence the level of identification within samples can vary a lot.
So, I want to link a vector, or at best a data frame, that holds abundance data for tips and nodes, to a tree (even this proved to be problematic as all functions that I found make distinctions between tip and node data). In the next step, I would like to recursively sum-up the abundances along the tree, from the leaves to the root. When the data is properly linked, this should not be too complicated, once the tree is reordered into the “postorder” format. Afterwards, the computed data should be converted in a format, that can be included into plots. Alternatively, I also came up with the idea, that the abundance data could be visualised by the branch lengths of the tree. I would be more than grateful, if someone could offer me some help with this project. I have been wrecking my head around this since months now. I attached a graphical representation of my idea in case my explanations are a bit confusing (orange color, abundances before computation; green, summed up aundances). Best wishes to all of you! Mario
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