Alternative to using ifelse to assign dataframe to different lists?

I have a list (gro) of groups ('gg', 'gm', 'gp', 'mg', 'mm', 'mp', 'pg', 'pm', 'pp') which tells me which species are in which groups. I also have a list of data frames (before) with the data for each species.

I want to take dataframes from before and create new lists named for each group. I have been doing this with nested ifelse statements, but this is very ugly and convoluted:

gg_pow <- list()
gm_pow <- list()
gp_pow <- list()
mg_pow <- list()
mm_pow <- list()
mp_pow <- list()
pg_pow <- list()
pm_pow <- list()
pp_pow <- list()
for (i in 1:length(before)){
  df <- before[[i]]
  ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['gg']]$species),
         gg_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
         ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['gm']]$species),
                gm_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['gp']]$species),
                       gp_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                       ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['mg']]$species),
                              mg_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                              ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['mm']]$species),
                                     mm_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                                     ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['mp']]$species),
                                            mp_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                                            ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['pg']]$species),
                                                   pg_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                                                   ifelse(df$species[1] %in% paste0(gro[['pm']]$species),
                                                          pm_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df,
                                                                 pp_pow[[paste(df$species[1])]] <- df
                                                  )

                                            )

                                     )

                              )

                       )
                )

         )

  )
}

I am trying to improve my coding in general and I know I should be able to use lapply to acheive this, but I don't know how best to structure the function to apply to each element in before.

Any help in how to condense this all down would be greatly appreciated.