Reversing the decline of experimental community ecology: A technology roadmap

Summary This repository contains the data, R analysis scripts, and validation case study outputs associated with the manuscript: "Reversing the decline of experimental community ecology: A technology roadmap". Understanding how experimental approaches in community ecology have scaled in complexity and spatial-temporal reach over the past three decades is vital for identifying current bottlenecks. To evaluate these trends, we conducted a two-tiered systematic literature review alongside a high-throughput, automated case study validation. This repository provides the underlying datasets required to replicate our literature assessments, and core figures. Repository Contents & File Inventory The repository is structured as follows: 1. Systematic Literature Review Data Exp_CE_91-23.xlsx: The core systematic review dataset comprising 330 experimental studies published between 1991 and 2023 (10 studies per year). Contains columns tracking motivation, community attributes targeted, habitat, focal taxa, study setting, manipulation types, and spatiotemporal variables (more details in the readme file) Methods_rev_2013-2022.csv: The high-resolution sub-review dataset covering 100 papers (10 per year, 2013–2022) detailing the integration and levels of automated methods across four distinct stages of the experimental pipeline. 2. Microcosm Case Study & Pilot Validation Case_study_protists_S1.R: Script to analize videos using R package BEMOVI Protists_data.RData: Data frames containing counts obtained from videos and manually 3. Descriptive Metadata readme.rtf: Text file describing the datasets categorization definitions, search criteria, column headers, and execution requirements.