Merging casts

It might useful to pool or merge casts. This is frequently done if there are multiple casts done in one station, or at a similar time. By pooling casts, it can increase the volume sampled, allowing for more robust estimates of zooplankton abundance. However, be cautious when choosing to merge casts, averaging casts will produce similar esitimates and allow for more context about variation at a single site. Read more here.

To merge casts, you must provide a name_map argument. This should be a list where each element of the list is a character vector with the casts to be merged. The names of the list items will be the new names of the casts. Note that this will merge both $zoo_files and $par_files. For Example:

library(EcotaxaTools)

#merging casts based on station:
name_map = list(
    'gf' = ecopart_example$meta$profileid[which(ecopart_example$meta$stationid == 'gf')],
    'other' = ecopart_example$meta$profileid[which(ecopart_example$meta$stationid != 'gf')]
)

merged_obj <- ecopart_example |>
    merge_casts(name_map = name_map)
# now there's only two aggregate casts:
names(merged_obj$par_files)

[1] "gf"    "other"

names(merged_obj$zoo_files)

[1] "gf"    "other"