Analysis scripts and data for case studies of TerraDactyl software.

Research ranging from land use planning to ecology benefits from integrating spatial and temporal environmental data. Analyses on multiple environmental datasets are enhanced when there is a common set of variables, improving the ability of researchers to collaborate across a wide variety of projects. Addressing the need, we developed TerraDactyl, an online tool hosted on eDNA Explorer (ednaexplorer.org). TerraDactyl (Version 1 of TerraDactyl is available here: https://github.com/eDNA-Explorer/terradactyl/tree/v1.0 ) intakes user-provided geospatial coordinates and dates to extract environmental values from a series of datasets hosted on the Google Earth Engine (GEE). We demonstrate the utility of TerraDactyl with two case studies. The first study aims to classify protected areas in the US and Canada given only TerraDactyl data. In the second study we reanalyze published community compositional variation California environmental DNA (eDNA) samples to test whether variation is more strongly associated with environmental factor groups such as soil and topography when more variables are added by TerraDactyl. While some current limitations remain, such as the gaps in data available in polar and coastal regions, TerraDactyl offers a robust integrative tool to assist biodiversity and environmental research that has potential for expansion to include more datasets.

A detailed description of the files and scripts in this archive can be found in the README file. This README covers the structure of input files, and which scripts there are utilized by.

研究范围从土地利用规划至生态效益，均受益于时空环境数据的整合。当存在一组共同变量时，对多个环境数据集的分析能力得到增强，从而提高了研究人员在广泛项目中协作的能力。针对这一需求，我们开发了TerraDactyl，一个托管于eDNA Explorer（ednaexplorer.org）的在线工具。TerraDactyl（TerraDactyl的1.0版本可在此处获取：https://github.com/eDNA-Explorer/terradactyl/tree/v1.0）能够接收用户提供的地理空间坐标和日期，从一系列托管于Google Earth Engine（GEE）的数据集中提取环境值。我们通过两个案例研究展示了TerraDactyl的实用性。第一个研究旨在仅使用TerraDactyl数据对美国的加拿大保护区进行分类。在第二个研究中，我们重新分析了加利福尼亚环境DNA（eDNA）样本的社区组成变异，以测试当通过TerraDactyl添加更多变量时，变异是否与诸如土壤和地形等环境因素组的相关性更强。尽管TerraDactyl仍存在一些当前限制，例如极地和沿海地区数据可用性的空白，但它提供了一款稳健的综合工具，以辅助生物多样性和环境研究，并具有扩展以包含更多数据集的潜力。此存档中文件和脚本的详细描述可在README文件中找到。本README涵盖了输入文件的结构，以及哪些脚本被使用。）