Assessing the effectiveness of global protected areas in conserving plant community completeness

The establishment of terrestrial protected areas (PAs) is an effective strategy for conserving plant species diversity across multiple spatial scales—from local to global. This effectiveness can be assessed using the concept of plant community completeness, which quantifies the degree to which the local biodiversity potential (i.e., the site-specific species pool) is realized. Although community completeness offers valuable insights for nature conservation, few studies have applied this metric to evaluate PAs. We present the first global assessment of plant community completeness for PAs. We analyzed 41,980 plots located inside PAs and 28,599 plots outside PAs, comparing species richness, species pool, and community completeness across various ecoregions and biomes. Using the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic, we identified areas of high community completeness and evaluated the effectiveness of PAs in conserving this metric. Furthermore, we determined ecoregions with the potential to increase com..., , # Assessing the effectiveness of global protected areas in conserving plant community completeness

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.pzgmsbd0d](10.5061/dryad.pzgmsbd0d)

## Description of the data and file structure

### File and variables

#### File: DATA-updated.csv

**Description:** 

##### Variables

* Plot code: The code of study plots.
* Source: The database source.
* Observed diversity: The ln-transformed species richness per plot.
* Species pool: The ln-transformed species pool per plot.
* Community completeness: The percentage of species richness for the species pool per plot.
* Status: The status of protected or non-protected areas for the study plots.
* Ecoregion: The ecoregion to which the sampling plot belongs.
* Biome: The biome to which the sampling plot belongs.,