Data supporting "Illuminating cryptic rat movement ecology via dark fiber-traps"

# Publicly available data

## Dataset

This dataset aims to support the work presented in:

**Illuminating cryptic rat movement ecology via dark fiber-traps**

We deployed a DAS system on 20 km of unused fiber (known as “dark fiber”) spanning diverse habitats within telecommunication infrastructure in Yudu County, China. The DAS records acquisition parameters we used were:

| Parameter       | Value || :-------------- | :---: || Gauge length    |  10m  || Channel spacing |  10m  || Sampling rate   | 500Hz |

Our system continuously recorded vibroacoustic measurements on this array for 39 days, between June 26 and August 3, 2021. We detected rat activity in the DAS data collected from an 810-m section of the cable in a mountain tunnel that is inaccessible to humans.

To facilitate data storage and sharing, we used Numpy package to save data containing wild rat signals as ***.npz** files with the following naming rules: Date in the format *YYYYMMDD*, UTC+8 of the first sample, and separated by an underscore "_".

**Each file contains the following variables:**

- data: Phase difference recorded by DAS system- timestamp: Date and time (UTC+8) of every sample- distance_along_tunnel: Distance along the cable from the tunnel entrance

For more description of each file, please refer to **Data S1**. We also drew multi-channel diagrams corresponding to each file and saved them as ***.jpg** files using the same naming rules.

**Notes:**

- The file ”20210804_042600” contains the data **only** used for Fig. 2.- The file ”20210724_220726” contains the data used for Fig. 3.