Global leaf sulphur stoichiometry and the relationships with nitrogen and phosphorus: phylogeny, growth form and environmental controls

Sulphur (S) is an essential bioelement with vital roles in serving regulatory and catalytic functions, and tightly coupled with N and P in plants. However, globally stoichiometric patterns of leaf S and its relationships to leaf N and P are less well studied. We compiled 31,939 records of leaf-based data for 2,600 plant species across 6,652 sites worldwide. All plant species were divided into different phylogenetic taxa and growth forms. Standard major axis analysis was employed to fit the bivariate element relationships. A phylogenetic linear mixed effect model and a multiple regression model were used to partition the variations of bioelements into phylogeny and environments, and then to estimate the importance of environmental variables. Global geometric mean leaf S, N and P concentrations were 1.44, 15.70 and 1.27 mg g-1, with significant differences among plant groups. Leaf S-N-P positively correlated to each other, ignoring plant groups. The scaling exponents of LN-LS, LP-LS and L..., , , # Global leaf sulphur stoichiometry and the relationships with nitrogen and phosphorus: phylogeny, growth form and environmental controls

In total, we collected 31939 records of data , and 2600 plant species belonging to 1186 genera, 210 families, 69 orders, 7 classes and 4 divisions. The overall plants were divided into two growth forms: woody and herb, five growth forms within woody plants: conifer tree, deciduous broad-leaf tree (DB), evergreen broad-leaf tree (EB), deciduous (D) shrub and evergreen (E) shrub. Herbs were subdivided into aquatic and terrestrial herbs by habitats, and into graminoids and forbs by leaf types. The collected environment variables (MAT, MAP, BIO2, BIO5, BIO6, BIO13, BIO14 and BIO15) were used to analyze the response of the leaf elements (leaf S, leaf N and leaf P) to them.

## Description of the Data and file structure

We have thirteen sheets in this dataset file.

Sheet 1, named \"Overall_data\", we have a 31940*36 matrix.

Sheet 2, named \"Metadata\" conta...