DOI: 10.5061/dryad.rfj6q57fj
title: Regional plot x species data for alpine vegetation

description: Whether the distribution and assembly of plant species are adapted to
 current climates or legacy effects poses a problem for their conservation
 during ongoing climate change. The alpine regions of southern and central
 Europe (SACEU) are compared to those of the western US and Canada (WUSAC)
 because they differ in their geographies and histories. Individual-based
 simulation experiments disentangled the role of geography in species
 adaptations and legacy effects in four combinations: approximations of
 observed alpine geographies vs. regular lattices with the same number of
 regions (realistic and null representations), and virtual species with
 responses to either climatic or simple spatial gradients (adaptations or
 legacy effects). Additionally, dispersal distances were varied using five
 Gaussian kernels. Because the similarity of pairs of regional species
 pools indicated the processes of assembly at extensive spatiotemporal
 scales and is a measure of beta diversity, this output of the simulations
 was correlated to observed similarity for Europe and North America. In
 North America, correlations were highest for simulations with approximated
 geography and location-adapted species; those in Europe had their highest
 correlation with the lattice pattern and climate-adapted species. Only
 SACEU correlations were sensitive to dispersal limitation. The southern
 and central European alpine areas are more isolated and with more distinct
 climates to which species are adapted. In the western US and Canada, less
 isolation and more mixing of species from refugia has caused location to
 mask climate adaptation. Among continents, the balance of explanatory
 factors for the assembly of regional species pools will vary with their
 unique historical biogeographies, with isolation lessening disequilibria.
description: The WUSAC and SACEU datasets are tables of the presence of
 species in the alpine habitats of the mountain ranges.
 The WUSAC dataset was derived from a variety of sources,
 including theses and regional floras by Malanson et al. (2015) with some
 additions. The species lists for added regions that did not
 well-differentiate the alpine zone were reduced to those species that were
 in the alpine zone of at least three of the regions with good
 differentiation or were linked to the alpine by name (e.g., binomial
 <em>alpinus</em> or common name “alpine …”). This choice was a
 compromise between excluding regions and including species as alpine that
 were not. The species nomenclature was updated and reconciled using the
 Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org) and
 cross-checked with the UDSA PLANTS Database (plants.sc.egov.usda.gov). The
 54 regions with the individual sources of the species pools are listed in
 Supplementary Material Appendix 2 Table A2 of the published
 paper. The SACEU dataset was derived from:
 Jiménez-Alfaro, B., Abdulhak,
 S., Attorre, F.,
 Bergamini, A., Carranza, M.L., Chiarucci, A., … & Winkler, M.
 (2021). Postglacial determinants of regional species pools in alpine
 grasslands. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 30, 1101-1115. and complete
 data are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0cfxpnw1h
description: This dataset is a partial duplicate of another published dataset:
 https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.xksn02vkp. Please refer to that link for the complete dataset.