DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sm0145s
title: Data from: Interspecific variation in ploidy as a key plant trait outlining local extinction risks and community patterns in fragmented landscapes

description: 1. Polyploidy is associated with a plethora of phenotypic and genetic
 changes yielding transformative effects on species’ life-history and
 ecology. These biological attributes can contribute to the success of
 species on ecological timescales, as observed in the invasion success or
 rapid environmental and climatic adaptation of polyploids. However, to
 date there has been a distinct lack of empirical evidence linking species’
 local extinction risk, species distributions and community structure in
 fragmented landscapes with interspecific variation in ploidy. 2. We aimed
 to investigate the relationship between levels of habitat fragmentation
 and patterns in both diversity and the frequency of species with different
 ploidy levels. We included additional persistence- and dispersal related
 life-history traits, to establish the relative importance of ploidy in
 determining species richness and frequencies following habitat
 fragmentation. We therefore collected plant community presence-absence
 data and landscape data from grassland fragments from South-Central
 Sweden. 3. Community-level analysis uncovered that interspecific variation
 in ploidy proved the strongest predictor of plant community species
 richness and turn-over across grassland fragments. Local extinction risk
 decreased as ploidy increased, with diploids most prone to local
 extinction. 4. In the species-level analysis, ploidy outweighed the
 combined explanatory power of commonly used life-history traits such as
 clonality, dispersal mechanism and mating system; key predictors of plant
 species distributions across fragmented landscapes. 5. Ploidy appears to
 capture parallel variation in a series of advantageous genetic and
 life-history mechanisms which operate on ecological timescales, emerging
 as the strongest predictor of local extinction risk even after accounting
 for variation in other crucial life-history traits. Our results therefore
 highlight the importance of genomic traits such as ploidy and total
 chromosome number as valuable factors explaining and predicting local
 extinction risk in fragmented landscapes.
description: Plant community, related
 landscape data and GPS vegetation plot locationsExcel sheet with three
 tabs. First tab contains the presence absence of 122 grassland species for
 each of 134 2m x 2m vegetation plots across the fragmented grassland
 landscape in southern Sweden which acted as study area. The second tab
 contains the predictor variables used to describe the local and spatial
 processes associated with habitat fragmentation, calculated for each of
 the 134 grassland plots. The third and final tab are the exact GPS
 locations (latitude-longitude) for each of the 134
 plots.Plue_Kimberley_Slotte_FunctionalEcology.xlsxContemporary land cover in the study areaCompressed zip-file to reconstruct the shapefile describing contemporary land cover in the fragmented grassland landscape near Stallarholmen, Selaön in Southern Sweden which was used as study area. Veg_code represent the various land cover categories: 1 Coniferous forest, 3 Cultivated grassland, 5 Deciduous forest, 6 Alluvial forest, 7 Semi-natural grassland, 8 Wet semi-natural grassland, 9 Overgrown semi-natural grassland, 10 Mixed deciduous forest, 13 Housing, 15 Midfield islet = Remnant semi-natural grassland, 17 Arable field. Originally digitised by Sara A.O. Cousins in Cousins, S.A.O., & Eriksson, O. (2008). After the hotspots are gone, land use history and grassland plant species diversity in a strongly transformed agricultural landscape. Applied Vegetation Science, 11, 365-374.LandCoverMap.zip