Hydroperiod and functional dispersion (birds, plants and aquatic macroinvertebrates) in the Prairie Pothole Region of Alberta

We provide both data and R Code.<br>The data provide the functional dispersion for birds(y2), plants (y1) and aquatic macroinvertebrates (y2) and pond permanence in wetlands surveyed between 2013-2014 in the Prairie Pothole Region of southern Alberta. To measure the functional dispersion of each taxon, we used Rao’s quadratic entropy, which does use the weighted mean distance of each species to the group centroid, where weights are based on species relative abundances. We used four proxies for wetland pond permanence, and these include approximate number of days a wetland contained water(x1), maximum water depth observed during the survey period(x2), ratio of water amplitude (i.e., maximum – minimum observed water depths) to maximum depth (x3), and an index of evaporative losses to the atmosphere relative to water inputs based on stable isotopes analysis (x4). We relativized both the biological and ponded permanence variables by dividing each cell by the column maximum.<br>The provided code details how we constructed structural equation models using these data.