Model code and output for a comparison of methods for meta-analysis investigating covariance between genetic and environmental (CovGE) effects in phenotypic results

Abstract

The data for the CovGE meta-analysis from the RCN-ECS project were published as dataset "Metadata for studies from meta-analysis investigating covariance between genetic and environmental (CovGE) effects in phenotypic results (DOI: 10.26008/1912/bco-dmo.877414.1)." However, this dataset contains a meta-analysis comparing our approach with the method described by Stamp and Hadfield (2020) in Ecology Letters.

The data tables in this dataset contain output of the model described in forthcoming results publication Albecker et al. (n.d.) "Meta-analysis reveals patterns of cogradient and countergradient variation." This results publication used meta-analysis to measure CovGE and GxE across 354 phenotypes within 64 studies.

Katie Lotterhos, with input from the authors, created the "Behavior_of_PL_metric.Rmd" file which provides an in-depth comparison of the two measures and contains R code and rendered figures created with R-Markdown (.Rmd). Dr. Lotterhos documented code and interpretation to demonstrate similarities and contrasts among the two approaches (see Supplemental File "Behavior_of_PL_metric.pdf"). She also uses subsets of simulated data to demonstrate how the two approaches calculate CovGE or PL metric using the same data.

For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/934896