Data from: Interactive effects of warming and competition do not limit the adaptive plastic response to drought in populations of a Mediterranean plant

This dataset contains the phenotypic data measured during the experiment
and the R code employed in the statistical analyses of the paper
"Interactive effects of warming and competition do not limit the
adaptive plastic response to drought in populations of a Mediterranean
plant", published in Global Change Biology. Water scarcity is the
main selective pressure determining the performance of Mediterranean plant
populations, with climate change predicted to increase the intensity and
duration of droughts. However, drought rarely acts in isolation. Climate
change also involves substantial warming in this region and may disrupt
natural processes, including biotic interactions. Phenotypic plasticity
allows plants to cope with rapid and multifaceted environmental changes.
Although our knowledge of plastic responses to drought in Mediterranean
plants has increased in recent years, how co-occurring simultaneous
stressors interact to produce additive, synergistic, or antagonistic
effects that enhance or constrain adaptive plastic responses to drought is
still unknown. Using a factorial experimental approach based on a
multivariate common garden, we assessed whether adaptive phenotypic
plasticity to drought and population differentiation in traits related to
drought response were affected by the occurrence of other key simultaneous
stressors, warming and intraspecific competition, in a Mediterranean
gypsum endemic shrub. In response to drought, plants expressed adaptive
plastic responses associated with a mixed resource-use strategy, combining
conservative (sclerophyllous leaves with higher water use efficiency) and
acquisitive (advanced phenology) phenotypic responses. Although the
response to drought was modified by synergistic and antagonistic
interactions with warming and competition, these interactions did not
change the direction or reduce the extent of adaptive plasticity to
drought. This suggests that plastic responses to drought may also provide
benefits against warming and competition. Finally, we detected significant
population differentiation in all functional traits, but phenotypic
differences in reproductive biomass were significantly reduced under
combined drought and warming. Our results emphasize the robustness of
adaptive plasticity to drought under complex stress scenarios and
underscore the importance of realistic, multifactorial experimental
approaches to predict whether adaptive responses of plant populations will
remain effective in a climate change context and influence their future
ecological and evolutionary dynamics.