How can I plot a tree (and squirrels) in R?

Question

Here is my tree:

tree = data.frame(branchID = c(1,11,12,111,112,1121,1122), length = c(32, 21, 19, 5, 12, 6, 2))

> tree
  branchID length
1        1              


        

Answer 1

Well, you could convert your data to define a "tree" as defined by the ape package. Here's a function that can convert your data.frame to the correct format.

library(ape)

to.tree <- function(dd) {
    dd$parent <- dd$branchID %/% 10

    root <- subset(dd, parent==0)
    dd <- subset(dd, parent!=0)

    ids <- unique(c(dd$parent, dd$branchID))
    tip <- !(ids %in% dd$parent)
    lvl <- ids[order(!tip, ids)]
    edg <- sapply(dd[,c("parent","branchID")], 
        function(x) as.numeric(factor(x, levels=lvl)))

    x<-list(
        edge=edg,
        edge.length=dd$length,
        tip.label=head(lvl, sum(tip)),
        node.label=tail(lvl, length(tip)-sum(tip)),
        Nnode = length(tip)-sum(tip),
        root.edge=root$length[1]
    )
    class(x)<-"phylo"
    reorder(x)    
}

Then we can plot it somewhat easily

xx <- to.tree(tree)
plot(xx, show.node.label=TRUE, root.edge=TRUE)

Now, if we want to add the squirrel information, we need to know where each branch is located. I'm going to borrow getphylo_x and getphylo_y from this answer. Then I can run

sx<-Vectorize(getphylo_x, "node")(xx, as.character(squirrels$branchID)) -
    tree$length[match(squirrels$branchID, tree$branchID)] +
    squirrels$PositionOnBranch
sy<-Vectorize(getphylo_y, "node")(xx, as.character(squirrels$branchID))

points(sx,sy)
text(sx,sy, squirrels$name, pos=3)

to add the squirrel information to the plot. The final result is

It's not perfect but it's not a bad start.