Interspecific competition negates CO₂ benefits for most plant species

Elevated CO₂ (eCO₂) frequently increases plant growth and primary productivity, and is considered a driver of increased land carbon sinks. This evidence contributes to a widespread but surprisingly untested assumption in global change science and policy, and society at large, that eCO₂ consistently stimulates the growth of plant species within communities. However, species and community responses depend on species’ growth strategies and abiotic and biotic contexts, and among these, the role of competition remains underexplored. We therefore ask whether eCO2 enhances growth broadly across species, or primarily in a dominant few? To address this question of how species interactions are shaped by eCO₂ response and competitive ability, we analysed responses from 97 species in 20 grassland CO₂ enrichment experiments. Herein, we show that interspecific competition markedly reduced eCO₂ stimulation: while most species responded positively to eCO₂ in isolation, over half responded negatively in..., , # Interspecific competition negates CO₂ benefits for most plant species

## Overview

This repository contains the R code and datasets used to generate Figures 2, 3, and 4 for the manuscript *Interspecific competition negates CO₂ benefits for most plant species* (Raubenheimer et al., 2026, Nature Plants revision).

All analyses are run from a single master script and reproduce all figures and supplementary tables.

## Repository structure

/Data/
MetaAnalysis_Data5.csv
MetaAnalysis_Data6.csv
Sum_Of_Mix.csv
Traits2.csv

/Code/
RCode.R

README_DRYAD.Rmd
README.md

## Dataset variable definitions

### MetaAnalysis_Data5.csv

Description: Species-level biomass. Cells with 'NA' represent where a value is not applicable (rather than just missing). Note where 'CO2' is abbreviated in the variables; this refers to carbon dioxide.

Variables:

| Column | Description | Units / Notes |
|--------|-------------|----------------|
| X | Row index | — |
| Species | Scientific name | matches Traits2.csv ...,