Data from: "Warming acts through earlier snowmelt to advance but not extend alpine community flowering"

This data package contains values used to support conclusions drawn in “Warming acts through earlier snowmelt to advance but not extend alpine community flowering”, by Jabis et al. 2020. The study was conducted in the Alpine site of the Alpine Treeline Warming Experiment (ATWE), on Niwot Ridge, Colorado, USA. The file types in this archive include six comma-separated-values (.csv) files, one Microsoft Word (.docx) file, one portable document format (.pdf), one plain text file (.txt), and one rich-text-format file (.rtf), all compressed within “Jabis_etal_2020Ecology_Data.zip”. The .csv files can be opened with either Microsoft Excel, R, or a simple text-editor program. The .txt and .rtf files can also be opened by simple-text-editing softwares. The .docx file can be opened by Microsoft Word, and the .pdf file can be opened by Adobe Acrobat Reader, or any software compatible with the file format. There are also two geospatial datasets also associated with this archive: a .kml file containing four placemarks bounding the field site, and a compressed file containing two ESRI shapefiles (.shp). The .kml file can be opened with either Google Maps or Google Earth, and the shapefiles can be opened by any geographic information system applications, including the entire ESRI ArcGIS suite, and QGIS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We asked whether active heat would advance alpine flowering phenology, and whether the influence on onset of spring flowering phenology would occur directly through increased temperature, or indirectly through advanced snowmelt or drier soils. We also considered how the flowering phenology of various functional groups (lifeform and early-late onset groups) would respond to warming. To accomplish this, we used infrared heaters to induce earlier snowmelt and to warm plants and soil, and manual watering to offset warming-induced decreases in soil moisture. We recorded the flowering phenological state of each plant species in 20 plots on a weekly basis following snowmelt at the alpine site of the Alpine Treeline Warming Experiment on Niwot Ridge, CO. To disentangle the role of temperature from snowmelt and soil moisture, we recorded soil temperature and moisture every 15 minutes at 5-10 cm depth. Date of snowmelt was recorded within plots as days with greater than 0.5°C diel soil temperature variability, and confirmed with field snow surveys conducted twice per week.