Biogeographical variation in termite distributions alters global deadwood decay

Fungus-growing termites (subfamily Macrotermitinae) have a distinct geographical distribution, found only in the old-world tropics. Where present, they are considered to be major contributors and regulators of decomposition, with consumption rates often greater than other termite groups. This study sought to understand the relative roles of termite distribution (specifically the presence or absence of fungus-growing termites) and climatic variables (mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation and mean annual aridity) on global patterns in deadwood decay. To answer this question, we added new salient data to an existing dataset on global wood decay by Zanne et al. (2022) available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19920416.v1. We filtered the data to only include sites where termites were present and thus analysed a dataset containing 102 sites across 16 countries. We found that termite-driven decay of deadwood increased with aridity but was higher in sites with fungus-growin..., All experimental data collected on the decay of wood blocks in the datasets 'new_global_wood_decay.csv' and 'pine_shade.csv' followed a standard protocol outlined by Cheesman et al., (2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/aec.12561. Data in 'new_global_wood_decay.csv' was collected from 140 sites across 20 countries by different researchers. A complete description of how data was collected in this dataset is provided in Zanne et al., (2022), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3856. All researchers followed the same method except for one difference: data from the original Zanne et al., (2022) dataset covered wood blocks with 70% green shade cloth to reduce solar radiation degradation of mesh bags while new data did not use green shade cloth.  Environmental parameters for each site were extracted from global databases, mean annual temperature (MAT) and mean annual precipitation (MAP) was extracted from WorldClim, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5086, and mean annual aridity (MAA) from th..., , # Data from: Biogeographical variation in termite distributions alters global deadwood decay

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

This repository contains the data and analyses used for the manuscript 'Biogeographical variation in termite distributions alters global deadwood decay'.

There are three .csv files in total, including 'new_global_wood_decay.csv', 'site.covars.csv', and 'pine_shade.csv', and all R-scripts used to run the analyses and plot figures.

## Description of the data and file structure

1. The dataset 'new_global_wood_decay.csv' in the supplementary files combines new experimental data on the decay of *Pinus radiata* wood blocks with existing data from Zanne et al., (2022) [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3856](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3856) downloaded from [https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19920416.v1](https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19920416.v1). There are 12603 rows of data ...