Demographic rate directional change and its determinants reveal how plant species win in a patchy landscape with frequent droughts

Relative growth rate (RGR) has been a core demographic performance trait in community ecology because its species-specific divergent responses to light often determine community structure and dynamics. Nevertheless, how divergent responses of plant species in RGR to water stress govern community assembly, alongside the mechanistic basis of inter- and intra-specific variations in functional traits, remains elusive. We propose a theoretical framework for describing how directional change of RGR across dry and wet patches drives community assembly in a landscape with frequent droughts. The framework was applied to a subtropical understory shrub community where rock fragment content, an important proxy for water stress, shows strong spatial variability. Our empirical evidence demonstrated that RGR directional change (RGRdir change) was more robust than RGR in wet patches, RGR in dry patches, and the mean RGR in predicting species’ dominance hierarchy. Intraspecific variation in functional t..., , # Data from: Demographic rate directional change and its determinants reveal how plant species win in a patchy landscape with frequent droughts

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cgkd](10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cgkd)

## Description of the data and file structure

Demographic rate directional change and its determinants reveal how plant species win in a patchy landscape with frequent droughts

This is the dataset of “Demographic rate directional change and its determinants reveal how plant species win in a patchy landscape with frequent droughts” (FE-2024-01375.R2), which has accepted by *Functional Ecology*.

### Files and variables

#### File: FE-2024-01375.R2.xlsx

**Description:** The sheet 'trait data': contains the values of 11 functional traits for 15 target tree species in the planting experiment; the sheet 'dir change data': contains the plasticity values (with positive/negative signs) of the 11 functional traits for the target tree species; the sheets 'Growth experiment RGR data' and ...,