Phylogeny and geospatial data on the native woody trees and shrubs of southern Africa

Reconstructed phylogeny of woody trees and shrubs including over 1300 species (some non-native species are included) from 115 families and 541 genera. We sequenced the core plant barcodes (rbcLa and matK) from sampled material, and merged these data with matching barcode sequence data in GenBank from tree species native to the region. We then used the merged sequence matrix to reconstruct a comprehensive phylogeny of south African woody trees and shrubs, following protocols detailed in Maurin et al. (2014). Branch lengths were calibrated in millions of years using Bayesian MCMC implemented in BEAST v.1.4.8 and 28 fossil calibrations from Bell et al. (2010) as minimum age constrains, except for the root of the Eudicots, which was set at 124 myr. Voucher specimen information and GenBank accession numbers are listed on the BOLD DataSystem (www.boldsystems.org).Geospatial data for southern Africa at a resolution of 0.5º × 0.5º grid cells, listing latitude and longitude centroids for each cell, and matching data on woody plant phylogenetic diversity, total species richness, richness of threatened woody plants, AET, elevation, human population density, Nitrogen addition as fertilzer, cropland and per capita GDP.