EDI Staging Environment
Data associated with a manuscript examining compositional variation in grassland plant communities around the globe. We used a globally distributed experiment to examine variation in species composition within 60 grasslands on 6 continents. Each site had an identical experimental and sampling design: 24 plots x 4 years. We expressed compositional variation within each site—not across sites—using abundance- and incidence-based metrics of the magnitude of dissimilarity (Bray-Curtis and Sorensen, respectively), abundance- and incidence-based measures of the relative importance of replacement (balanced variation and species turnover, respectively), and species richness at two scales (per plot-year (alpha) and per site (gamma)). We assessed species composition separately for each site and then compared patterns among sites, asking: (1) How does small-scale compositional variation differ among grasslands?; (2) Can compositional variation within a site be predicted by its biotic and abiotic context?; and (3) Does a combination of metrics enhance our understanding of the ecological processes at individual sites? This data package includes the site-specific values of each metric and the explanatory variables used to predict differences in compositional variation among sites. Scripts to conduct analyses and create figures and tables are also provided.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
