Above and belowground functional community variation in sandy dunes

The role of plant traits in shaping community assembly along environmental gradients is a topic of ongoing research. It is well accepted that plant traits of aboveground organs tend to be conservative in stressful conditions. However, there is limited understanding of how belowground traits respond. Plants may have similar strategies above and belowground, but an intriguing possibility is that there is a trade-off between above and belowground traits of communities to both ensure efficient resource-use and limit niche overlap along the gradient. To test this, we asked whether the response of above and belowground traits of communities is coordinated or not along a stress gradient in Mediterranean sand dune communities. We analyzed 80 vegetation plots in Central Italy to test for coordinated vs independent patterns in above vs belowground plant traits using community weighted mean and standardized effect size of functional richness. Our results show that plant communities close to the se..., , List of units for all the selected plant traits present in the dataset:plant height (H) : mspecific leaf area (SLA) : mm2/gseed mass (SM) : gspecific root lenght (SRL): cm/mgroot tissue density (RTD) : mg/cm3belowground organ water content (BOWC) : %