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Best practices for reporting climate data in ecology

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A large number of published ecological studies fail to include basic information about the climate data used. In the interest of reproducibility and transparency, we offer recommendations for best practices that we urge Editors, authors, and reviewers to adopt in future publications.

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Fig. 1: Trends over time in reporting practices.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Papper for help with data collection, S. Veloz and T. Dawson for comments that improved this manuscript, and M. Schildhauer for discussions on ecological metadata language. N.M.H. acknowledges support from a Villum Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF96) for support to the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate. The research was further supported by NSF Research Grants to A.H.T. (DEB-1354552) and S.N.S. (DBI-1523866), and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Grants to M.F.O. (#DGE-1106400), M.M.K., and R.L.O. (#1049702).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Naia Morueta-Holme, Meagan F. Oldfather, Rachael L. Olliff-Yang, Andrew P. Weitz, Matthew M. Kling, Seema N. Sheth, Andrew H. Thornhill & David D. Ackerly

  2. Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Naia Morueta-Holme

  3. Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Carrie R. Levine

  4. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Erin C. Riordan

  5. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Cory Merow

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  1. Naia Morueta-Holme
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  2. Meagan F. Oldfather
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  3. Rachael L. Olliff-Yang
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  4. Andrew P. Weitz
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  5. Carrie R. Levine
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  6. Matthew M. Kling
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  7. Erin C. Riordan
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  8. Cory Merow
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  9. Seema N. Sheth
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  10. Andrew H. Thornhill
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  11. David D. Ackerly
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Contributions

N.M.H., M.F.O., R.L.O., A.P.W., C.R.L., M.M.K., E.C.R., C.M. and D.D.A. designed the study. N.M.H., M.F.O., R.L.O., A.P.W., C.R.L., S.N.S., M.M.K., E.C.R., C.M. and A.H.T. collected the data. N.M.H. analysed the data, and wrote the paper with D.D.A. M.M.K. and C.M. contributed to analysis and data visualizations. All authors contributed to editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Naia Morueta-Holme.

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Morueta-Holme, N., Oldfather, M.F., Olliff-Yang, R.L. et al. Best practices for reporting climate data in ecology. Nature Clim Change 8, 92–94 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0060-2

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