The fortedata R package: open-science datasets from a manipulative experiment testing forest resilience

Abstract

The fortedata R package is an open data notebook from the Forest Resilience Threshold Experiment (FoRTE) – a modeling and manipulative field experiment that tests the effects of disturbance severity and disturbance type on carbon cycling dynamics in a temperate forest. Package data consist of measurements of carbon pools and fluxes and ancillary measurements to help analyze and interpret carbon cycling over time. Currently the package includes data and metadata from the first three FoRTE field seasons, serves as a central, updatable resource for the FoRTE project team, and is intended as a resource for external users over the course of the experiment and in perpetuity. Further, it supports all associated FoRTE publications, analyses, and modeling efforts. This increases efficiency, consistency, compatibility, and productivity while minimizing duplicated effort and error propagation that can arise as a function of a large, distributed and collaborative effort. More broadly, fortedata represents an innovative, collaborative way of approaching science that unites and expedites the delivery of complementary datasets to the broader scientific community, increasing transparency and reproducibility of taxpayer-funded science. The fortedata package is available via GitHub: https://github.com/FoRTExperiment/fortedata (last access: 19 February 2021), and detailed documentation on the access, used, and applications of fortedata are available at https://fortexperiment.github.io/fortedata/ (last access: 19 February 2021). The first public release, version 1.0.1 is also archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4399601 (Atkins et al., 2020b). All data products are also available outside of the package as .csv files: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13499148.v1 (Atkins et al., 2020c).