Average Coordinate Points in R?

Question

I have a.csv of species occurrences with individual lat-long points, but I am trying to aggregate them all into a singular 'average' coordinate point per species. From some digging I see there can be issues with a simple average (high altitude or low altitude outliers can cause issues). Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do this easily/quickly in R? Thanks

Data is seen up like this but I have 71,000+ occurrences total.

species	longitude	latitude
Abies amabilis	-111.112964	41.199112
Abies arizonica	-110.8678	37.0349
Abies bifolia	-111.650833	41.82
Abies bifolia	-113.377722	41.950833

Answer 1

Using

your_data <- tibble::tribble(~species, ~longitude, ~latitude, "Abies amabilis", -111.112964, 41.199112, "Abies arizonica", -110.8678,  37.0349, "Abies bifolia", -111.650833,     41.82, "Abies bifolia", -113.377722, 41.950833)

you could do

aggregate(. ~ species, your_data, mean)

to calculate averages. This returns:

          species longitude latitude
1  Abies amabilis -111.1130 41.19911
2 Abies arizonica -110.8678 37.03490
3   Abies bifolia -112.5143 41.88542

Alternatively, dplyr could be used to do

library(dplyr)

your_data %>%
  group_by(species) %>%
  summarize(across(.fns = mean))

which similarly returns

# A tibble: 3 x 3
  species         longitude latitude
  <chr>               <dbl>    <dbl>
1 Abies amabilis      -111.     41.2
2 Abies arizonica     -111.     37.0
3 Abies bifolia       -113.     41.9

Answer 2

Using data.table

library(data.table)
setDT(df1)[, lapply(.SD, mean), species]