Summarizing two variables into one

Question

I would like to pool the data from two different variables and sum it up. The original dataframe looks like this:

  group animal period zone        day cum_time_sec
  <chr> <chr>  <chr>  <chr>     <dbl>        <dbl>
1 chr   chr1   q1     eating        1        3.22 
2 chr   chr1   q1     interzone     1        2.14 
3 chr   chr1   q1     marble        1        4.26 
4 chr   chr1   q1     nest          1        0.624

I would like to pool the data from nest and marble and collapse them into a single row. Using recode I got to this:

  group animal period zone        day cum_time_sec
  <chr> <chr>  <chr>  <chr>     <dbl>        <dbl>
1 chr   chr1   q1     eating        1        3.22 
2 chr   chr1   q1     interzone     1        2.14 
3 chr   chr1   q1     nest          1        4.26 
4 chr   chr1   q1     nest          1        0.624

but what I'm looking for is this:

  group animal period zone        day cum_time_sec
  <chr> <chr>  <chr>  <chr>     <dbl>        <dbl>
1 chr   chr1   q1     eating        1        3.22 
2 chr   chr1   q1     interzone     1        2.14 
3 chr   chr1   q1     nest          1        4.884 

Would be very grateful for some help. Thank you :)

Answer 1

Without a minimal reproducible example it's kind of hard to be sure, but this should work:

library(dplyr)
yourdata %>%
  mutate(zone = ifelse(zone == "marble", "nest", zone)) %>%
  group_by(group, animal, period, zone, day) %>% 
  summarise(cum_time_sec = sum(cum_time_sec)) %>%
  ungroup()