Reciprocal transplants reveal asymmetric local adaptation of Himalayan Rhododendron approaching elevational range limit

As plant species expand their upper limit of distribution under current warming, some retain both traditional climate space and biotic environment while others encounter novel conditions.  The latter is the case for Rhododendron campanulatum,a woody shrub that grows both above and below treeline at our study site in the Eastern Himalaya where a very conspicuous, stable treeline was defined by a nearly contiguous canopy of tall Abies spectabilis trees, many of them over a century old.  Prior work showed that treeline had remained static in this region while R. campanulatum expanded its elevational range limit. We tested local adaptation of R. campanulatum by performing reciprocal transplants between the species’ current elevational range limit (4023masl) and just above treeline (3876 masl). Contrary to expectation, the coldest temperatures of late winter and early-mid spring were experienced by plants at the lower elevation: R. campanulatum at species’ limit (upper site) were covered by ..., The dataset was collected by making various measurements of plants and sites in the field in Nepal Himalaya. Please see the README document of this repository and the accompanying publishied article: Mainali K, S Adhikari, S Shrestha, C Parmesan, MC Singer, J White. 2023. Reciprocal transplants reveal asymmetric local adaptation of Himalayan Rhododendron approaching elevational range limit. Ecosphere [accepted]. , Any program can be used that reads excel and csv files. However, we have also provided R code to process and analyze the data, and plot the output.