Functional traits and size interact to influence growth and carbon sequestration among trees in urban greenspaces

There is persistent uncertainty about how integrated plant functions, like growth, are mechanistically constrained and practically predicted by functional traits. For trees, these knowledge gaps persist for two reasons: first, studies of ‘natural’ forests are observational, with highly variable and confounding resource limitation and competition; second, most studies investigate only a few popular traits and ignore context-dependencies in trait-effects on growth (e.g., trait-environment or trait-ontogeny interactions).
We assessed 17 traits as predictors of radial growth and aboveground carbon sequestration for 182 trees, including individuals of 42 species common to temperate cities. By focusing exclusively on planted trees growing in isolation, our unique study is a pseudo-experiment that spans a large range of taxonomic and trait variability and minimizes confounding effects of environmental heterogeneity (e.g., shifts in light availability with tree size). Focal traits included not..., , , # Functional traits and size interact to influence growth and carbon sequestration among trees in urban greenspaces

This dataset contains size, growth, and trait data for 182 trees belonging to 42 different deciduous broadleaf trees growing in two different urban greenspaces (Lake View Cemetery and Secrest Arboretum) in Northeastern Ohio, USA.

## Description of the data and file structure

There are two datafiles of interest: a .csv file (urban_tree_ms_data) which contains size, growth, and trait data for all individual trees, as well as other metrics of potential interest (e.g., tree health information, coordinates of each tree, soil texture and pH, topography, etc.) and a .xlsx file (urban_tree_ms_metadata) which contains info on the manuscript (title, abstract, authors, etc.) as well as information on the columns contained in the data file.