Cycles in Lynx Numbers
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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 fur trade records from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).
Take a look at the paper. It’s a thing of beauty, from a time when data sets were sufficiently small that you could tabulate them completely in the body of a paper.
Data Repository
Although the paper was published many decades ago, the PDF version is not a scanned image of the printed pages but contains the original, selectable text. As a result, tables and other data can be extracted accurately and completely. I used Textract to gather the data from the tables. Given the clarity and simplicity of the tables I could probably have done this with simpler, local tools. The extracted data can be found here.
Comparison
For comparison purposes I loaded the data for Table 4 and created a plot.
Compare with Figure 7, the corresponding plot from the paper.
LGTM.
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