Continent-scale Energetics of African Mammals and Bird
Description
This data is associated with the paper "Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa". The energetics analysis of sub-Saharan African birds and mammals was calculated in R using a the R script Loft.Energetics.2407017.R. The original data in the analysis come from a number of publicly available datasets. To ease code reproducibility, all the input data used in the analysis (which in some cases have been cleaned or filtered) are also uploaded here. The script in its entirety takes ~72 hours to run on a reasonably powerful laptop. To save the user time, some computationally intensive intermediate data products are provided in these files, although each of these can also be produced by running the script in its entirety. Further information on code structure is provided in the annotated script itself. Any questions and reasonable requests for additional data products should be directed to the corresponding author at ty.loft@chch.ox.ac.uk. Below we list the annotated contents of this folder.
Files
Steps to reproduce
The steps to reproduce are elaborated in the Nature paper: Loft, T., Oliveras Menor, I., Stevens, N. et al. Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa. Nature 649, 104–112 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09660-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09660-1
Institutions
- University of Oxford School of Geography and the EnvironmentOxfordshire, Oxford