Climate and habitat type interact to influence contemporary dispersal potential in Prairie Smoke (Geum triflorum)

Understanding dispersal potential, or the probability a species will move a given distance, under different environmental conditions is essential to predicting species’ ability to move across the landscape and track shifting ecological niches. Two important drivers of dispersal ability are climatic differences and variation in local habitat type. Despite the likelihood these global drivers act simultaneously on plant populations, and thus dispersal potential is likely to change as a result, their combined effects on dispersal are rarely examined. To understand the effect of climate and varying habitat types on dispersal potential, we studied Geum triflorum - a perennial grassland species that spans a wide range of environments, including both prairie and alvar habitats. We explored how the climate of the growing season and habitat type (prairie vs alvar) interact to alter dispersal potential. We found a consistent interactive effect of climate and habitat type on dispersal potential. Ac..., 1) geum_data.csv - trait data for geum.  Trait data measured in the lab.
2) terminalvelocity_data.csv - terminal velocity data collected from dropping seeds through a tunnel with light receptors in the lab
3) height_data.csv - data on heights of G. triflorum individuals collected from digital herbarium specimens provided by: University of Minnesota, University of Manitoba, the Canadian Museum of Nature (CAN), and the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada National Collection of Vascular Plants (DAO).
4) wind_data.csv - wind data from a weather station near Moorehead, MN
5) PCA_results.xlsx - the PCA results for our climate variables to demonstrate how we chose the variables we did in our analysis.
6) climate_data_tomerge_trait.csv: The .csv file to merge with geum_data.csv for analyses from that dataset (code merges these together).  Created from ClimateNA
7) climate_data_tomerge_tv.csv: The .csv file to merge with terminalvelocity_data.csv for analyses from that dataset (code merges these to..., , # Climate and habitat type interact to influence contemporary dispersal potential in Prairie Smoke (*Geum triflorum*)

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3bk3j9kt0](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3bk3j9kt0)

In this experiment we sampled seeds from natural populations of *Geum triflorum* plants across the northern Midwestern US and Canada to determine their dispersal ability in their two habitat types (prairie and alvar habitats) across the range of climate that exists across *G. triflorum's* range. We collected dispersal traits on the seeds (e.g. mass, length, width and area), as well as terminal velocity on these seeds. We also collected data on the height at seed release of these plants, as well as the climate data in these populations from the years the seeds were collected from climateNA (a climate database). We then ran the WALD dispersal model on these seeds to estimate their dispersal potential. We found that as climate warmed in a particular year (as the number of growing degree...