DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdft5
title: Lifespan, clonality and polyploidy regulate the global environmental niches of plants via seed dispersal in space and time

description: Global environmental niches have been considered in relation to the
 effectiveness of environmental management. Functional traits can explain
 the environmental niches of plant species at different spatial scales,
 from community to globe. However, the roles of seed dispersal in space and
 time in plant environmental niche and tolerance are not clear.
 Furthermore, knowledge of the regulation of plants’ global environmental
 niches by lifespan, clonality and polyploidy remains limited. In response,
 the main objective of the research reported here was to explore how these
 factors regulate the global environmental niches of plants via seed
 dispersal in space and time. We obtained data on plant species’ seed mass,
 seed dispersal ability, dormancy, lifespan, clonality and polyploidy from
 a variety of databases and quantified global environmental niche and
 tolerance based on the niche axes of climate, soil and elevation.
 Subsequently, we used phylogenetic generalized least square linear
 regression and structural equation models to assess the relationships of
 seed traits (i.e. seed mass, seed dispersal distance and dormancy),
 lifespan, clonality and polyploidy with environmental niches. We found
 significant relationships between seed mass, seed dispersal distance,
 dormancy, lifespan, clonality and polyploidy on the one hand and
 environmental niche and tolerance on the other, based on the axes of
 climate, soil and elevation. Compared with lifespan, ploidy and clonality,
 seed traits explained more variations in environmental niches and
 tolerance for plants. Importantly, we built pathways indicating that
 lifespan, clonality and polyploidy regulate the global environmental niche
 and tolerance of plants via seed mass and/or seed dispersal in space and
 time. Our study clearly highlights the mechanisms underlying environmental
 niches from different perspectives, including seed temporal-spatial
 dispersal, lifespan, clonality and polyploidy. Environmental niche theory
 may broadly support global-change-adaptation management for biodiversity
 conservation and ecosystem maintenance using the perspective of spatial
 and temporal patterns in ecology.
description: We collected species data from the Global Biodiversity
 Information Facility [GBIF; GBIF.org (30 January 2021) GBIF Occurrence
 Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.yruzm2 and GBIF.org (30 January 2021)
 GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.pytkny].
 We first discarded the following types of sampling errors and
 sources of bias on the basis of García‐Roselló et al. (2014) and Zizka et
 al. (2019): 1) duplicated records within the area at a specific spatial
 resolution; 2) records with both longitude and latitude = 0°; 3) records
 for which the longitude and latitude were identical and probably
 represented erroneous repetitive data entry; 4) records with incorrect
 species names; 5) occurrences where the GBIF ‘coordinate uncertainty’
 field was &gt;10 km; and 6) occurrences whose ‘Basis of records’ GBIF
 field was ‘literature’ or ‘living specimen’ (generally, these descriptors
 refer to occurrences sampled in museums or ex situ collections,
 respectively). Sampling correction was conducted using
 the CoordinateCleaner and dismo packages in the R software environment
 (https://www.r-project.org/). Currently accepted taxonomic names of plant
 species were based on The Plant List (V1.1;
 http://www.theplantlist.org/). Finally, we obtained the
 occurrence records of 1,827,213 plant species at the global scale.
 Finally, the occurrence records were collected for the study plant species
 with existing data on seed traits, lifespan, clonality, and polyploidy
 from the studies of Van Drunen and Husband (2019), Chen et al.
 (2020), Klimesova et al. (2017), and Rice et al. (2019).