Repository of analyses: A new approach to interspecific synchrony in population ecology using tail association

Shyamolina Ghosh, University of Kansas

Lawrence W. Sheppard, University of Kansas

Philip C. Reid, University of Plymouth

Daniel C. Reuman, University of Kansas

Introduction

This repository records the complete workflow that produced the paper from the data. All analyses can be reproduced and the paper and supporting information recompiled (see below).

How to compile

Knit makefile.Rmd using R markdown. If all dependencies are in place (see next section) this should re-compute all analyses from data to paper, resulting in three pdfs: MainText.pdf (the main text of the paper), SuppMat.pdf (the supporting information file for the paper), and makefile.pdf (notes on the compilation process - can be useful for error mitigation in the event of failure).

The knit should take about an hour or less on a standard modern laptop. Subsequent knits, if any, can be even faster because packages will be installed (see below) and because intermediate results are cached. If you try to knit MainText.Rmd or SuppMat.Rmd directly, you may have some limited success, but cross-document references and other features will fail so this is not recommended. To compile the documents from the command line, use the following: Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('makefile.Rmd')".

Dependencies

Core software dependencies

• R
• R markdown
• R studio
• latex
• bibtex

Data dependencies

Datasets are not included in the Data folder, and need to be obtained and put there for the code to run. A dataset which includes the plankton data we used, as a subset, can be obtained from the Dryad Digital Repository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rq3jc84. We do not have the rights to release the aphid data, so those data are not in the repository. The aphid data came from the Rothamsted Insect Survey (RIS) of Rothamsted Research (https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/insect-survey). The plankton data came from the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) dataset of the Marine Biological Association of the UK (https://www.cprsurvey.org/). Both organizations have clear policies for sharing data on their websites. James Bell (james.bell@rothamsted.ac.uk) is our contact at RIS and P. Chris Reid (pchrisreid@googlemail.com) is our contact at CPR. If a user obtains written permission from these organizations then we will be happy to provide these datasets in the format expected by repository code.

Dependencies on the R checkpoint package

Code uses the R checkpoint package. This is set up in the master file makefile.Rmd in the R chunk checkpoint_chunk, which contains the following line of code specifying a date :

checkpoint("2019-01-01",checkpointLocation = "./")

The checkpoint package then automatically scans through other files looking for other required R packages. It then downloads and installs the versions of those packages that were available on the given date. This helps ensure that re-compiling the document uses exactly the same code that was originally used, in spite of package updates and other changes. This can take some time on first run but it is faster on subsequent runs because the packages are already installed. This also means that R package dependencies should only be the checkpoint package, since that package should scan for other packages and install them locally. Quite a few MB disk space are used (about 300Mb).

Dependencies on pandoc

The open source program pandoc converts documents from one format to another. Here, the knitr package uses it to convert the markdown files into latex format so that they can then be turned into PDF files. Installers for multiple operating systems are available here: https://pandoc.org/installing.html.

Dependencies on pdflatex

The makefile makes a system call to pdflatex, so software supporting that needs to be installed:

• On Windows, you can use Miktex (https://miktex.org/howto/install-miktex),
• On Linux, install latex (e.g., sudo apt-get install texlive), and
• On Mac, use the MacTeX installer (http://www.tug.org/mactex/)

Additional dependencies?

If you find additional dependencies were needed on your system, please let us know: reuman@ku.edu. The compilation process was tested by Ghosh on Ubuntu 16.04 and by Reuman on a similar computing setup. It has not been tested on other platforms. We have endeavored to list all dependencies we can think of above, but we have only compiled on our own machines, so we cannot guarantee that additional dependencies will not also be needed on other machines, even after data are included (see above). This repository is intended to record a workflow, and is not designed or tested for distribution and wide use on multiple platforms. It is not guaranteed to work on the first try without any hand-holding on arbitrary computing setups.

Intermediate files:

Knitting the makefile automatically produces a lot of 'intermediate' files. Files ending in .tex are the converted documents from .Rmd including all the R code output and the rest (files ending .log, .aux, .lof, .lot, .toc and .out ) are intermediate files that pdflatex uses to keep track of various parts of the document. Some of these can be useful for diagnosing problems, if any.

Acknowlegements:

We thank the many contributors to the large datasets we used; D. Stevens and P. Verrier for data extraction; and Joel E. Cohen, Lauren Hallet, and Jonathan Walter for helpful suggestions. We thank James Bell of the Rothamsted Insect Survey (RIS). The RIS, a UK Capability, is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council under the Core Capability Grant BBS/E/C/000J0200. SG, LWS and DCR were partly funded by US National Science Foundation grants 1714195 and 1442595 and the James S McDonnell Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the McDonnell Foundation.