Tree community composition data at species, genus, family and order level in forest-survey plots across the world

The dataset includes tree community composition and environmental data of 861 forest-survey plots across the world. The compositional matrices are abundance-based (i.e. count of individual stems) and comprised of species (21,455), genus (2,741), family (240), and order (57) levels. The plot environment includes biogeographical regions where the plots are located (South American, African, Indo-Pacific, Australian, North American, West Eurasian, and East Eurasian; the classification is based on Cox 2001 doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2699.2001.00566.x with some modifications), bioclim variables 1-19 and elevation (Worldclim ver.2 Fick and Hijmans 2017; http://www.worldclim.org), plot-area and minimum diameter threshold of measurement (information from original literature). These data were used in the manuscript (Kusumoto et al. Journal of Vegetation Science doi: 10.1111/jvs.13017) to evaluate dissimilarity-to-distance relationships in each biogeographical region. The source list of original literature is provided in a supplementary material in Kubota et al. 2018 Journal of Vegetation Science (doi: 10.1111/jvs.12648 ).