Seed functional traits for 55 Chilean woody species

We collected seeds for 55 woody species across Chile, and measured the following functional traits: seed mass (Seed_mass; mg), seed width (Seed_width; mm), and seed length (Seed_length; mm). 

In the field, we collected fruits from reproductively mature individuals, from which we subsequently extracted and cleaned the seeds. We dried samples at 70 C for 4 days and weighed them with a precision of 0.001 g. For dry seed mass, we divided the total weight of the seeds (mg) in a sample by the number of seeds. For seed length (mm) and width (mm), we measured seeds with a micrometer and then calculated the average values for each sample. For samples with more than 10 seeds, we selected a random sample of 10 seeds, which we  measured as described above. For species with small seeds we scanned a random selection of 10 seeds, which we measured using ImageJ. Additionally, we provide the coordinates (occurrenceLong, occurrenceLat; datum = WGS84) where samples were collected.

Here, we present population-level means for the above-mentioned functional traits in standardised format, with the following columns: traitID, traitName, traitValue, traitUnit, verbatimScientificName, verbatimTraitName, verbatimTraitValue, verbatimTraitUnit, measurementID, occurrenceID, occurrenceLong, and occurrenceLat. 

Trait standardisation was performed using the "traitdataform" R package (Schneider 2022) and scientific names were harmonized based on the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) and Tropicos using the "TNRS" R package (Maitner and Boyle 2022).

References

Maitner, B. and B. Boyle (2022). TNRS: Taxonomic Name Resolution Service. R package version 0.3.1.

Schneider, F.D. (2022) traitdataform - harmonizing ecological trait data in R, v0.6.8, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1489527 

http://ecologicaltraitdata.github.io/traitdataform