Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities

Current rates of climate change are exceeding the capacity of many plant species to track climate, thus leading communities to be in disequilibrium with climatic conditions. Plant canopies can contribute to this disequilibrium by buffering macro-climatic conditions and sheltering poorly adapted species to the oncoming climate, particularly in their recruitment stages. Here we analyze differences in climatic disequilibrium between understory and open ground woody plant recruits in 28 localities, covering more than 100,000 m2, across an elevation range embedding temperature and aridity gradients in the southern Iberian Peninsula. This study demonstrates higher climatic disequilibrium under canopies compared with open ground, supporting that plant canopies would affect future community climatic lags by allowing the recruitment of less arid-adapted species in warm and dry conditions, but also it endorse that canopies could favor warm-adapted species in extremely cold environments as mountai..., , , This repository contains a series of .csv files developed for the study titled \"Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities\", authored by: Perez-Navarro MA, Lloret F, Molina-Venegas R, Alcántara JM and Verdú M. The author of these files is Perez-Navarro MA. These files are used to characterize species niches, estimate climatic disequilibrium for recruit communities growing under plant canopies and open spaces, and conduct statistical analyses.

Variables description of each table is compiled in the METADATA.txt file. Please visit Github readme () to correctly place these files in the folder tree and check for the corresponding scripts where they are required. Please notice that although alternative approaches were calibrated to estimate species niche (accordingly producing multiple niche, distances and disequilibrium dataframes), only niche centroid calibrated discarding 95 percentile of lowest niche density was used for paper results and figures....