3  Working with PFTC data

3.1 PFTC data repositories

The cleaned datasets from the PFTC courses are stored on an OSF repository (short repo). Each course has it’s own data repo. The following table shows the link to each of the repos.

Course	Country	Data repo
PFTC1 and 2	China	China repo
PFTC3 and 5	Peru	Peru repo
PFTC4	Svalbard	Svalbard repo
PFTC6	Norway	3D repo
		Incline repo

3.2 Data paper and data documentation

The site, experiment, data collection methods and data dictionaries for each course are described in data papers. Some information can also be found on the GitHub readme file.

Course	Country	Data paper/documentation
PFTC1 and 2	China	Data paper
PFTC3 and 5	Peru	GitHub readme
PFTC4	Svalbard	GitHub readme
PFTC6	Norway	3D: GitHub readme
PFTC6	Norway	Incline: GitHub readme

Read the papers and documentation carefully before using the data.

3.3 Data usage and citation

The data are available for use and teaching purposes under a CC-BY licence. We suggest to cite the data paper if available, or alternatively the OSF repo. We appreciate being contacted for advice or collaboration, if relevant, by users of these data. In cases where our data make up >10% of the data used in a downstream publication, we suggest contacting us for our contribution and collaboration.

3.4 Download PFTC data

We have created a R package to download the data, called dataDownloader. If you are using the package for the first time you need to install the package using the command below. If you have used it before, just run the second line of code to load the package.

devtools::install_github("Between-the-Fjords/dataDownloader")
library(dataDownloader)

Now you can download the all the files you need. Let’s download the community data and the trait from the Svalbard course.

get_file(node = "smbqh",
         file = "PFTC4_Svalbard_2018_Gradient_Traits.csv",
         path = "webpage/data",
         remote_path = "Traits")
                       
get_file(node = "smbqh",
         file = "PFTC4_Svalbard_2018_Community_Gradient.csv",
         path = "webpage/data",
         remote_path = "Community")

Exercise

Now it is your turn. Copy the code into your console and download the data.