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The paper The ten-year cycle in numbers of the Lynx in Canada by Charles Elton and Mary Nicholson is a foundational work in population ecology and wildlife dynamics. They documented the regular, roughly ten-year population cycle of the Canadian Lynx (Lynx canadensis)observed in the fur trade documentation of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).
Take a look at the paper. It’s a beautiful thing, from a time when datasets were so small that you could summarize them completely in the body of an article.
Data storage
Although the article was published many decades ago, the PDF version is not a scanned image of the printed pages, but contains the original, selectable text. This allows tables and other data to be extracted accurately and completely. I used Text extract to collect the data from the tables. Given the clarity and simplicity of the tables, I probably could have done this with simpler, local tools. The extracted data can be found here.
Comparison
For comparison, I loaded the data for Table 4 and created a plot.
Compare with Figure 7 the corresponding graph from the article.
LGTM.
Related
#Cycles #Lynx #Songs #bloggers