Plant-mycorrhizal associations may explain the latitudinal gradient of plant community assembly

Biogeographical variation in community assembly processes forms the basis of the latitudinal gradient of biodiversity by driving b-diversity. Classical studies on community assembly predict environmental filtering affecting b-diversity more strongly at higher latitudes, where productivity is lower and abiotic stress is stronger. Contrary to this prediction, recent evidence indicates that plant community composition at higher latitudes exhibits more spatially clustered distributions independently of background environments, suggesting the importance of spatial processes, such as priority effects. In this study, we propose a hypothesis that resolves this paradox by considering plant-soil feedback and biogeographic variations in the dominant mycorrhizal type: we predict that the increasing prevalence of ectomycorrhizal (EcM) trees with latitude contributes to the spatially clustered distribution of plants, as EcM trees tend to exhibit positive plant-soil feedback. We analyzed a large-scale..., All the original data, that we have processed to use in this study, was collected from www.biodic.go.jp (vegetation data), https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/jp/dataset/lulc_j.htm (land-use data), and www.mlit.go.jp/en/index.html (abiotic environmental data)., , # Title of Dataset

This is the dataset associated with the article \"Plant-mycorrhizal associations may explain the latitudinal gradient of plant community assembly\" by Shinohara et al. All the data used in this study are publicly available; the links to the source dataset can be found below.

## Description of the data and file structure

Here are the data files archived in this repository:

1. floor_data.csv: Vegetation survey data.\
The included variables are: Class (the height classes of species. 1: canopy, 2: subcanop, 3: shrub, 4: herb), Coverage (the coverage class of species, following the Braun-Blanquet scale); Sp_ID (the species identity which can be referred to \"Species_list_w_family.csv\"); plotID (the plot identity which can be referred to \"Habitat_mod.csv\" and \"Climate_mod.csv\"); Second_mesh (the second mesh ID); Lat (latitude); Lon (longitude); Area (the area of survey plots); sp_site (the species-by-plot identity, which was generated for the analytical purpose).
2. ...