Data and code from: Functional rarity of plants in German hay meadows - patterns on the species level and mismatches with community species richness

Functional rarity (FR) - a feature combining a species’ rarity with the distinctiveness of its traits - represents a promising tool to better understand the ecological importance of rare species and consequently to protect functional diversity more efficiently. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of FR on both the species level (which species are functionally rare and why) and the community level (how is FR associated with biodiversity and environmental conditions). Here, we quantify FR for 218 plant species from German hay meadows on a local, regional, and national scale by combining data from 6500 vegetation relevés and 15 ecologically relevant traits. We investigate the association between rarity and trait distinctiveness on different spatial scales via correlation measures and show which traits lead to low or high trait distinctiveness via distance-based redundancy analysis. We test how species richness and FR are correlated and use boosted regression trees to determine environm..., Data in this dataset were requested from external resources and are either:a) publicly available, orb) not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
Data sources and instructions to request/download the data are given in the README file., Required software:R (4.1.2) to load \".RData\" filesRStudio to open \".R\" files containing the code used to carry out the analysis