Plant trait response of tundra shrubs to permafrost and nutrient addition

Plants may alter their strategies, such as growth and resource acquisition, as a result of climate change, especially in areas like the Arctic. These changes might affect in turn ecosystem functions and vegetation-climate interactions. Plant traits reflect both strategies and plant trade-offs in response to environmental conditions. In combination with observational data, experiments mimicking future climate conditions and data involving multiple leaf and stem traits, can contribute to a better mechanistic understanding of feedbacks between shrub growth strategies, permafrost thaw and carbon and energy fluxes.

This dataset contains both metadata and plant trait data measured in individuals of four arctic shrub species under experimental conditions. The permafrost thaw and fertilization experiment (Peng et al., 2017) ran for four years (2011-2014) in the nature reserve of Kytalyk, north-eastern Siberia (70°49'N, 147°28'E). The shrub species, dominant at the research site, were the deciduous species Betula nana ssp. exilis (Sukazcev) Hultén and Salix pulchra Cham., and the evergreen species Ledum palustre ssp. decumbens (Aiton) Hultén and Vaccinium vitis-idaea L.

Methods
The methods used for generating  and processing the data are explained in Iturrate-Garcia et al. (2020); https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2019-498