The dataset consists of data appendices from the paper: 'Environmental correlates of key functional traits in Australian plant communities based on relative abundance in plots'.
The data enable calculation of community weighted mean and community weighted variance of three traits at sites across Australia by merging species level trait values from AusTraits with species cover values recorded in TERN Ausplots. CWM and CWV can then be related to gradients of climate, soil and landscape by matching to values extracted from stacks of spatial environmental data layers.
Appendix S2 consists of four csv tables:
A–traits (trait values for leaf area, maximum height and seed mass, matched to species, including gap-filled data)
B–environment (climate, soil and landscape variables extracted at the location of Ausplots sites included in the analysis)
C–sites (site data for Ausplots sites included in the analysis)
D–veg (vegetation data for Ausplots sites included in the analysis, consisting of species percent cover against site surveys)
Appendix S3 is a text file containing R code to reproduce analysis from the paper, based on the input csv datasets.
Data sources:
TERN Ausplots data were sourced from ausplotsR (Guerin et al. 2019; TERN 2020).
Trait data were sourced from v0.9.1 of AusTraits (Falster et al. 2019).
Environmental data were sourced Grundy et al. (2015), Harwood et al. (2016), and Gallant et al. (2018).
References:
Falster, D., et al. (2019). AusTraits: a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora (Version v0.9.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3568417
Gallant J, Austin J, Williams K, Harwood T, King D, Nolan M, Mokany K (2018) 9s soil and landform for continental Australia analysis of biodiversity pattern: aggregated from 3s data. v1. In: CSIRO (ed.) Data Collection. CSIRO, https://doi.org/10.4225/08/5b285fd14991f.
Grundy MJ, Rossel RV, Searle RD, Wilson PL, Chen C, Gregory LJ (2015) Soil and landscape
grid of Australia. Soil Research 53, 835–844.
Guerin G, Saleeba T, Tokmakoff A (2019) ausplotsR: TERN AusPlots analysis package. R package version 1.1. https://github.com/ternaustralia/ausplotsR. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3905746
Harwood T, Donohue R, Harman I, McVicar T, Ota N, Perry J, Williams K (2016) 9s climatology for continental Australia 1976-2005: Summary variables with elevation and radiative adjustment. v1. In: CSIRO (ed.) Data Collection. CSIRO, https://doi.org/10.4225/08/5afa9f7d1a552.
TERN (2020) AusPlots ecosystem surveillance monitoring dataset (URL: http://aekos.org.au/collection/adelaide.edu.au/ausplotsrangelands). Obtained via the ausplotsR R package (URL: https://github.com/ternaustralia/ausplotsR), accessed 31 January 2020.