Atacama tutorial

Hello!

I was wondering if someone knows where to find the description of metadata in Atacama tutorial?

I read the original paper, and but they do not mention some of the features, for example, I was wondering what's the difference between "high" and "low" in the temperature and humidity measurements and what do the following features represent:
extract-concen
amplicon-concentration
percentcover

here is the link to the metadata.

Thank you!

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Hi @Oleg, I checked with the senior author of that study, Prof Julie Neilson, on your questions. Her replies (paraphrased here):

what's the difference between "high" and "low" in the temperature and humidity measurements

These values show the range. So the ‘high’ is the max temperature or relative humidity value recorded and the ‘low’ is the minimum. The values were collected and averaged over 7 days. We put data loggers in one pit at a single depth at each of the sites (sites are indicated in the metadata file you shared). The depth was 20cm. The average values represented an average of all values from the one pit at each site.

extract-concen

This was the DNA extract concentration in ng/ul. We included this in the metadata file because it impacted our amplicon sequencing success rate. Many of our values were right on the technical threshold of enough DNA to sequence. My recollection is that we needed ~ 0.01 ng/ul.

amplicon-concentration

This was the DNA concentration of amplicon library before sequencing. Again we recorded this to evaluate whether amplicon concentration affected sequence read yield and quality.

percentcover

This is the percentage of the ground covered by vegetation at the site. It's determined using a rapid survey method for desert plant communities adapted from the Braun-Blanquet method by McAuliffe.

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