Functional Traits of Selected Tree Species in Harvard Forest, New Hampshire, and Southern Quebec 2015

Increasing evidence suggests that species' phenological responses may predict their performance with warming, but this work has generally ignored whether phenology is correlated with other traits known to drive plant performance. This is perhaps surprising given that interest in functional traits has also increased in recent decades, yet within the functional traits literature there has been an equally limited consideration of phenology, perhaps because robustly estimating it is time-intensive, and simple field estimates will show extreme variation across sites of different latitudes and climate regimes. Here we collected a suite of trait data on the same species for which we collected phenological data (see related dataset HF314, Leaf and Flower Phenology of Woody Plant Species at Harvard Forest and Southern Quebec 2015) to help address this gap. We focused on populations of trees in temperate forests in the Northeast face, which face different environmental conditions across their ranges. This project measured functional traits of trees at two to four sites, to provide a foundation for studies on the relationship between range shift, phenology, and functional traits.