Microbes that decompose plant litter need water. Deserts with infrequent rains have very little of this water, so you would expect decay to happen slowly in these ecosystems. In general, you would be right. But researchers have found that rainfall is a bad predictor of how much decomposition happens in certain deserts. Instead, dew and fog play a key role in wetting plant litter.
Building off of last week's assignment, Merging data, let's answer the question: "How long is the ground wet because of rain vs dew or other non-rain triggers?" This assignment uses real data from Namib Desert, Namibia, to look at how likely the ground is wet given a certain relative humidity. The zip file for this project is here 06_event_def.zip and you should return this directory as a zip file with the Rmd completed. There is no need to create a script file to support this project.
Your task here is to:
Define a moisture event
Attribute that event to rainfall or something else
Calculate how long the leaf wetness sensor was 'wet' during each kind of event.