How to prepare a dataset for VecDyn

Mar 24

So you have data that’s some sort of measurement of arthropod abundance/occurrence over time (and has some sort of location data) and want to prepare a dataset for VecDyn? Thats great! Here are some tips and how-tos for getting that spatiotemporal data into VecDyn.

Find a template

We think the easiest way to get started is to find a dataset that generally looks like yours and go from there.

Here is a dataset where there are 4 trapping locations, one species collected. Data is reported as one row for the number of animals collected per site per date.

Click the download button on a dataset to download the datafile in .csv format

Suggestions and Tips:

Check out the list of field definitions where you can see all the fields you can fill data in. Note you must have all the required fields which are indicated by “true” in the “Is Required” field. You can also see if a field requires say a string (text) or a number.
Please avoid any special symbols like accents/stress marks
You’ll note 3 special fields for data that might have come from a graph you digitized: digitized_from_graph, time_shift_possible, and date_uncertainty_due_to_graph. We have a whole blog post on what these fields mean.