
Metadata for Data_GenusOccurrence.txt

by Fritz et al.

If you use these datasets, please cite:



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DATA SUMMARY

Original mammal data of species and genera occurring in locations throughout the Neogene.
14084 lines of 23 columns


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DATA EXPLANATIONS: column names and content

- SourceDataset: the source dataset from which the record was derived: NOW or JANIS (see description of data processing below)
- LocalityID: the original locality identifier from either source dataset (called LIDNUM in the originals)
- LocalityName: the original locality name (NAME) from either source dataset
- LAT: latitude (decimal) - LAT from either source dataset
- LONG: longitude (decimal) - LONG from either source dataset
- Chronology: the chronological categories (North American Land Mammal Ages and Mammal Neogene zones) as assigned in either source dataset (MNEQ_L from NOW, CHRON from Janis)
- ContinentalBins: the land mammal ages we assigned (31 different ones based on data in Chronology, but this has NA for localities spanning several continental time periods)
- ContinentalBinStart: the start date we assigned our continental bin (million years ago)
- ContinentalBinEnd: the end date we assigned our continental bin (million years ago)
- GlobalTimeBins: the stratigrahic stages we assigned (global time bin scheme containing 8 stages for the Neogene, based on uniting the North American Land Mammal Ages and Mammal Neogene zones with global stratigraphic stage schemes)
- GlobalBinStart: the start date we assigned our global bin (million years ago)
- GlobalBinEnd: the end date we assinged our global bin (million years ago)
- Region: the region that we assigned the record to (6 different regions)
- Continent: the continent that we assigned the record to (Europe or North America)
- Country: the original country recoded in either source dataset (COUNTRY)
- Species, Genus, Subfamily, Family, Order: final taxonomic information assigned by us after taxonomic matching procedures described below (Species can be NA if it is a genus-level record). The data contain 690 unique genus names in 52 defined families (some have no family entry) across the 5 orders of large mammals.
- WM_ID, Centroid_x, Centroid_Y: the grid cell ID and longitude and latitude (both decimal) of the grid cell centroids, for the grid cell into which the locality falls (the grid is the Data_RegionsGridded file). These columns were generated with Rscript_MammalDataProcessing.


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DATA ORIGINS AND PROCESSING PRIOR TO UPLOADED SCRIPTS


NOW:
We extracted 13741 observations for the five selected orders during the Neogene in Europe and Asia on 20th Dec 2013 from the NOW database. 
Citation:
Fortelius, M. 2013. New and Old Worlds Database of Fossil Mammals (NOW), <http://www.helsinki.fi/science/now/>.

JANIS:
We extracted 5437 observations for the five selected orders during the Neogene in North America on 15th Dec 2013 from Christine Janis' private files (these are by now also available through the NOW database).
Citations:
Janis, C. M., Scott, K. M. & Jacobs, L. L. 1998. Evolution of Tertiary mammals of North America, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
Janis, C. M., Gunnell, G. F. & Uhen, M. D. 2008. Evolution of Tertiary mammals of North America, Vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).


TIME AND SPACE ASSIGNMENTS:
We assigned continental and global time bins (i.e. land mammal ages and stratigraphic stages) as described in our paper, based on the chronology information given in the source datasets (Table S1). Records that could not be assigned unambiguously to a unique stratigraphic stage were excluded entirely; records that could be assigned to a unique stratigraphic strage but not to a unique land mammal age were retained for the analyses based on the stratigraphic stages only, but were excluded in analyses based on the land mammal ages. We assigned regions based on the lat-long coordinates given in the source datasets, and excluded all records falling outside our defined regions (Fig. 1).


TAXONOMY CLEANING:
The datasets were matched to our final taxonomy with the Data_TaxonomyLookup.xls files (see its description in metadata file). Higher-level taxonomy was also assigned to each record based on those files. The procedure excluded all records were genus names could not be assigned ("indet." or "gen."), and we removed duplicate records after the taxonomy matching procedure.
