The utility of climatic water balance for ecological inference depends on vegetation physiology assumptions

This repository contains the data and code supporting the analyses in the corresponding paper in Global Ecology and Biogeography (GEB). The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Background: In modeling and explaining spatial vegetation patterns, ecologists have increasingly favored the use of climatic water balance variables, including actual evapotranspiration (AET) and climatic water deficit (CWD), for representing the hydrologic and energetic environment experienced by plants. Much of the interest in these variables lies in their hypothesized potential to characterize biologically relevant environmental variation more directly than simple climate variables such as precipitation and temperature. Practically, obtaining AET and CWD values across space requires hydrologic process models that involve assumptions, including assumptions about vegetation transpiration rates. However, transpiration parameter values are rarely known with precision and can vary several-fold within and among v...