DOI: 10.5061/dryad.kh18932dg
title: Data from: Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities

description: Current rates of climate change are exceeding the capacity of many plant
 species to track climate, thus leading communities to be in disequilibrium
 with climatic conditions. Plant canopies can contribute to this
 disequilibrium by buffering macro-climatic conditions and sheltering
 poorly adapted species to the oncoming climate, particularly in their
 recruitment stages. Here we analyze differences in climatic disequilibrium
 between understory and open ground woody plant recruits in 28 localities,
 covering more than 100,000 m2, across an elevation range embedding
 temperature and aridity gradients in the southern Iberian Peninsula. This
 study demonstrates higher climatic disequilibrium under canopies compared
 with open ground, supporting that plant canopies would affect future
 community climatic lags by allowing the recruitment of less arid-adapted
 species in warm and dry conditions, but also it endorse that canopies
 could favor warm-adapted species in extremely cold environments as
 mountain tops, thus pre-adapting communities living in these habitats to
 climate change.
description: This repository contains a series of .csv files developed for the study
 titled "Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in
 Mediterranean recruit communities", authored by: Perez-Navarro MA,
 Lloret F, Molina-Venegas R, Alcántara JM and Verdú M. The author of these
 files is Perez-Navarro MA. These files are used to characterize species
 niches, estimate climatic disequilibrium for recruit communities growing
 under plant canopies and open spaces, and conduct statistical analyses.
 Variables description of each table is compiled in the METADATA.txt file.
 Please visit Github readme
 ()
 to correctly place these files in the folder tree and check for the
 corresponding scripts where they are required. Please notice that although
 alternative approaches were calibrated to estimate species niche
 (accordingly producing multiple niche, distances and disequilibrium
 dataframes), only niche centroid calibrated discarding 95 percentile of
 lowest niche density was used for paper results and figures. Also, in case
 of univariate analyses only bio01, bio06 and bio12 were used in analyses,
 though species niche and further niche and community estimations were
 obtained for all 19 variables. This is version 2 (v2) and include extra
 intermediate .csv required to run all the R scripts included in the
 abovementioned Github repository. NAs or empty cells present in the .csv
 files of this repository means no data and do not contribute to the
 analyses. Visit METADATA.txt file for variables description. These data
 are under CC0 license. It is possible to share, copy and redistribute the
 material in any medium or format, and adapt, remix, transform, and build
 upon the material for any purpose. Studies using R scripts or any data
 files from these study should cite the abovementioned paper (Perez-Navarro
 MA, Lloret F, Molina-Venegas R, Alcantara JM, Verdu M. (2024). Plant
 canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit
 communities). Please contact m.angeles582@gmail.com in case of having
 doubts or problems with the existing files and scripts.