Simulate Coral Colony Sizes Using Skewed Distributions — simulate

This function simulates coral colony sizes per species using either a log-normal (rlnorm) or gamma (rgamma) distribution, based on the observed mean and standard deviation of colony widths in the input data. Each species will be sampled ndraws times.

Usage

simulate_coralsize(
  input = coralsize,
  distribution = "rlnorm",
  ndraws,
  plot = FALSE,
  seed = NULL
)

Arguments

input: A data frame with columns species and width. Default is coralsize.
distribution: Character string. Distribution type to simulate from. Supported options are "rlnorm" and "gamma".
ndraws: Integer. Number of simulated coral sizes per species.
plot: Logical. If TRUE, a histogram of simulated sizes is plotted by species.
seed: Optional integer. If provided, sets the random seed for reproducibility.

Value

A tibble with columns:

species: Factor indicating coral species
width: Simulated colony width values
area_cm2: Simulated colony area values (π × (width/2)²)