# Froy et al. (2021) Heritable variation in telomere length predicts mortality in Soay sheep. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
# PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE USING THE DATA OR SCRIPT ASSOCIATED WITH THIS PAPER

The attached archived file contains data derived from the long term field project monitoring individual Soay sheep on St Kilda. This is a request to please let us know if you use them. Several people have spent the best part of their careers collecting the data. 

If you plan to analyse the data, there are a number of reasons why it would be very helpful if you could contact j.pemberton@ed.ac.uk before doing so:

1)	Occasionally we discover and correct errors in the data.

2)	The data are complex and workers who do not know the study systems may benefit from advice when interpreting it.

3)	At any one time quite a few people within the existing project collaborations are analysing data from these projects. Someone else may already be conducting the analysis you have in mind and it is desirable to prevent duplication of effort.

4)	In order to maintain funding for the projects, every few years we have to write proposals for original analyses to funding agencies. It is therefore very helpful for those running the project to know what data analyses are in progress.

If you are interested in analysing the detailed project data in any depth you may find it helpful to have our full relational databases rather than the files available here.  If so, then we have a simple process for bringing you onto the projects as a collaborator.

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There are two dataset associated with this paper (available as supplementary files associated with the paper):

1. "PrunedPed.txt" - this is the Soay sheep pedigree file used in the quantitative genetic models. It includes rows for "ID", "dam" and "sire".

2. "SoaySheepRTL.txt" - this is the main data file used in our analyses. The rows/variables included in this datafile are as follows:
ID - Identity code of sheep
SampleYear - Year blood sample was taken
Sex - M: Male, F: Female
Adult - 0: Lamb (~4mo old), 1: Adult (>4mo old)
MumID - Identity of mother
Birth Year - Year of birth
Age - Age in years
Survival - 0: Died over winter following blood sampling; 1: Survived winter following blood sampling
Weight - August weight in kg
qPCRPlate - qPCR plate identifier
qPCRRow - qPCR row identifier
RTL - Relative telomere length

See methods section of the paper for further details of how these variables were measured and used in the analyses.

The R script used to conduct analyses presented in the paper are available at: https://github.com/hfroy/PNAS_2021