Fifteen physiological traits related to osmoregulation and reactive oxygen species metabolism in two life form aquatic plants under a natural water salinity gradient on the Tibetan Plateau and Northwest China

Aquatic plants, as the primary producers, determine the community structure and ecological function of freshwater ecosystems. However, salinization threatens inland freshwater wetlands and thus the survival of aquatic plants. Exploring the plant physiological responses to increasing water salinity could enhance our understandings of plant adaptive strategies under future climate change regimes in wetlands. We measured 15 physiological traits of 49 aquatic plant species along a large environmental gradient in alpine and arid regions of western China, to explore the physiological adaptions and compare the similarities and differences in adaptive strategies between the two life forms to natural water salinity. We found that both water salinity and low temperature were key factors affecting aquatic plants in alpine and arid regions. Aquatic plants adapt to saline habitats by accumulating proline and sulfur (S) concentrations, and to cold habitats by increasing ascorbate peroxidase activity...., We first bottled 500 ml water from an intermediate depth below the water surface for laboratory analysis. Three sediment columns were dug randomly from the upper 0-20 cm under the water-sediment interface and then mixed as the sediment sample for each site. All sediment samples were air-dried, ground, and sieved through a 0.15 mm sieve for further analysis. In total, we investigated 178 sites, including 90 sites on the Tibetan Plateau and 88 sites in the Northwest Region. We measured the salinity of undisturbed water in situ using a hand-held multi-parameter meter (PROPLUS, YSI, USA). The total Cl-, SO42-, Na+, K+, Mg2+, and Ca2+ contents in water were determined by an ion chromatograph (ICS-1000, DIONEX, USA). The total Ca, K, Mg, and Na concentrations in sediments were measured by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS-2030, Shimadzu, Japan) using the samples from the field, and the total sediment S concentration was measured by the elemental analyzer (UNICUBE, Elementar,..., , # Fifteen physiological traits related to osmoregulation and reactive oxygen species metabolism in two life form aquatic plants under a natural water salinity gradient on the Tibetan Plateau and Northwest China

Leaf physiological traits of aquatic plants in western China

In total, we collected 49 species for a total of 527 samples (\"data.xlsx\"). All 527 samples were used to determine 15 physiological traits including: chlorophyll (Chl), proline (Pro), soluble protein (SP), soluble sugar (SS), anthocyanin (Anth), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), catalase (CAT), glutathione (GSH), peroxidase (POD), superoxide dismutase (SOD), calcium (Ca), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), sodium (Na), and sulfur (S).

## Description of the data and file structure

We have three sheets in this dataset file. In sheet 1, we described the environmental variables for each site. In sheet 2, we have a 528*24 matrix.

The abbreviations for variables:
Variable Description
GSP Growing season precipitation mm
GST Mean g...