Collection of time series data
The time series in the database come from both published and unpublished sources. They have been located in a variety of ways: (1) By systematically searching back issues of the predominant ecological and science journals; (2) By following citation trails: when a suitable time series is located in a publication, there are usually one or more references to similar or comparable studies in the citations list: every paper tends to lead to another paper. (3) By searching the world wide web, where an increasing number of ecological datasets are being made available. (4) By searching promising book titles. The vintage literature often contains a wealth of tabulated data of varying types, and we have drawn extensively upon the resources of the Imperial College library and the British Library to locate many long-out-of-print volumes. (5) By negotiating access to unpublished data. Through our network of professional contacts we have endeavoured to locate unpublished data which collectors are prepared to contribute to the project. Quite often, and quite understandably, collectors prefer to retain data for their own use, at least until they have published. We have, however been delighted at the selfless response of several collectors, who have donated unpublished data with no, or few, restrictions.
All datasets are fully referenced in the database, and, before embarking on any analysis, we encourage you to locate and refer to the original source material wherever possible. In most case we have been able to provide the complete citation to enable you to do this.
