Regional plot x species data for alpine vegetation

Whether the distribution and assembly of plant species are adapted to current climates or legacy effects poses a problem for their conservation during ongoing climate change. The alpine regions of southern and central Europe (SACEU) are compared to those of the western US and Canada (WUSAC) because they differ in their geographies and histories. Individual-based simulation experiments disentangled the role of geography in species adaptations and legacy effects in four combinations: approximations of observed alpine geographies vs. regular lattices with the same number of regions (realistic and null representations), and virtual species with responses to either climatic or simple spatial gradients (adaptations or legacy effects). Additionally, dispersal distances were varied using five Gaussian kernels. Because the similarity of pairs of regional species pools indicated the processes of assembly at extensive spatiotemporal scales and is a measure of beta diversity, this output of the sim..., The WUSAC and SACEU datasets are tables of the presence of species in the alpine habitats of the mountain ranges.
The WUSAC dataset was derived from a variety of sources, including theses and regional floras by Malanson et al. (2015) with some additions. The species lists for added regions that did not well-differentiate the alpine zone were reduced to those species that were in the alpine zone of at least three of the regions with good differentiation or were linked to the alpine by name (e.g., binomial alpinus or common name “alpine …”). This choice was a compromise between excluding regions and including species as alpine that were not. The species nomenclature was updated and reconciled using the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org) and cross-checked with the UDSA PLANTS Database (plants.sc.egov.usda.gov). The 54 regions with the individual sources of the species pools are listed in Supplementary Material Appendix 2 Table A2 of the published paper.
The SA..., This dataset is a partial duplicate of another published dataset: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.xksn02vkp. Please refer to that link for the complete dataset.