The purpose of this function is to compute a custom tip-spacing for users who want to expand or contract the tip-spacing of the descendant taxa from a given node or nodes.
expand.clade(tree, node, factor=5)
# S3 method for expand.clade
plot(x, ...)tree an object of class "phylo" or "simmap".
node index or vector of node indices.
expansion factor for the tip-spacing of the taxa descended from node or nodes in node.
for plot method, an object of class "expand.clade".
optional arguments to be passed to plotTree or plotSimmap, depending on the class of x$tree.
The function returns an object of class "expand.clade" which consists of the (possibly re-ordered) tree and a numerical vector with the calculated tip spacing based on the expansion factor specified by the user. This object can be plotted using the S3 plot method for the object class; or it can be plotted simplying by calling a standard plotting function on the tree & tip spacings.
Revell, L. J. (2012) phytools: An R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods Ecol. Evol., 3, 217-223.