Vectorized Genus Extraction (Loops)

The following code extracts the genus from strings that are scientific names (include both genus and species). The str_extract function is from the stringr package, which is great for working with strings.

waterbird <- "cygnus olor"
str_extract(waterbird, "\\w+")

str_extract is a vectorized function meaning it can take a multiple species names as input and return one genera for each species.

1. Copy and modify the code above to display a vector of genera for the following vector of species names:

waterbirds <- c("cygnus olor", "aix sponsa", "anas acuta")

2. Copy the code below to create a data frame and then add a new genus column to that data frame that contains the just the genus (the first word in each pair). Display the data frame.

bird_data <- data.frame(species = c("cygnus olor", "aix sponsa", "anas acuta"))