Alex Slavenko from the University of Sheffield authored this dataset for a study on competition and morphological niche partitioning. The data likely contains morphological measurements for skink species across New Guinea, correlating with species richness and elevation. The dataset is published as Open Access (green) on Papers with Code.
Use Cases
- Modeling the relationship between species richness and morphological niche width based on the described metrics.
- Analyzing the effect of elevation on morphospace occupancy and body plan traits like size and limb length.
- Testing hypotheses about climatic selection pressures on reptile morphology in tropical highlands.
Strengths
- Focuses on the skink fauna of New Guinea, described as the world's largest tropical island.
- Dataset is associated with a peer-reviewed study testing specific ecological predictions.
- Available under an Open Access (green) license, facilitating reuse.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the paper.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
- Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
Provenance
- Source
- University of Sheffield
- Collection Method
- Likely gathered from field measurements or museum specimens of skinks across New Guinea.
- Geography
- New Guinea