Untangling the web: How spider traits link with management practices in agroecosystems

This dataset accompanies the manuscript "Untangling the Web: How
Spider Traits Link with Management Practices in Agroecosystems". It
includes the raw input matrices used to explore the functional composition
of spider communities across agroecological and conventional cereal fields
in the Swiss lowlands. The dataset consists of four tables:(1) L_spiders:
Relative abundances of 84 spider species across 22 field sites, derived
from standardized multi-method sampling (pitfall traps, sweep netting,
vacuum suctioning).(2) Q_traits: Functional traits of the observed spider
species, including hunting guild, dispersal ability, vegetation stratum,
preferred habitat, and body size.(3) R_filters: Site-level environmental
and management variables such as pesticide input (TFI), nitrogen
application, and landscape metrics.(4) R_veg: Local vegetation
characteristics based on percentage cover of plant species per site. From
this, community-weighted means (CWMs) for plant height, specific leaf
area, and leaf nitrogen content, as well as Rao’s functional diversity
(RaoQ), were computed. These data were prepared for RLQ and fourth-corner
analyses to assess how spider traits respond to environmental filtering
through direct and vegetation-mediated pathways.