Formatting data matrix for Jaccard Similiarity
17:07 10 Jun 2026

I'm trying to do a Jaccard Similarity on my presence/absence data in RStudio but I receive this error.

jaccard_dist <- vegdist(dat2, method = "jaccard", binary = TRUE)

Error in vegdist(dat2, method = "jaccard", binary = TRUE) : 
  input data must be numeric

My data frame is currently organised like this

dat2<- data.frame(site_number=c("BHS1", "BHS2", "BHS3"),
                    sp_1=c(0,0,1),     
                    sp_2=c(0,0,1) , 
                    sp_3=c(0,1,0) ,
                    sp_4=c(0,0,1) ,
                    sp_5=c(1,0,1) ,
                    sp_6=c(1,0,1))

All the species columns are numeric, not integers. But the site number is characters. How do I organise the data frame so that I no longer receive this error?

Thank you

dataframe jaccard-similarity