Data for: Traits help explain species’ performance away from their climate niche centre

Aim: Climate change impacts on biota are variable across sites, among species, and throughout individual species' ranges. Niche theory predicts that population performance should decline as site climate becomes increasingly different from the species’ climate niche centre, though studies find significant variation from these predictions. Here, we propose that predictions about climate responses can be improved by incorporating species' trait information.
Location: Europe
Methods: We used observations of plant species abundance change over time to assess variation in climate difference sensitivity (CDS), defined as how species performance (colonization, extinction, and abundance change) relates to the difference of site climate from the mean temperature and precipitation of each species’ range. We then investigated if leaf economics, plant size, and seed mass traits were associated with the species’ climate difference sensitivity.  
Results: Species that performed better (e.g., increase..., See manuscript., See methods and R code for the analyses can found here: https://github.com/jslynn33/macrocontext-and-traits