Supporting data for "The GenTree Platform: growth traits and tree-level environmental data in twelve European forest tree species"

Progress in the field of evolutionary forest ecology has been hampered by the huge challenge of phenotyping trees across their ranges in their natural environments, and the limitation in high-resolution environmental information.<br> The GenTree Platform contains phenotypic and environmental data from 4959 trees from twelve ecologically and economically important European forest tree species: <i>Abies alba</i> Mill. (Silver fir), <i> Betula pendula</i> Roth. (silver birch), <i>Fagus sylvatica</i> L. (European beech), <i>Picea abies</i> (L.) H. Karst (Norway spruce), <i>Pinus cembra</i> L. (Swiss stone pine), <i>Pinus halepensis</i> Mill. (Aleppo pine), <i>Pinus nigra</i> Arnold (European black pine), <i>Pinus pinaster</i> Aiton (maritime pine), <i>Pinus sylvestris</i> L. (Scots pine), <i>Populus nigra</i> L. (European black poplar), <i>Taxus baccata</i> L. (English yew), and <i>Quercus petraea</i> (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak). Phenotypic (height, DBH, crown-size, bark-thickness, biomass, straightness, forking, branch angle, fructification), regeneration, environmental <i>in-situ</i> measurements (soil depth, vegetation cover, competition indices), and environmental modeling data (precipitation, temperature, insolation, drought indices) were obtained from trees in 194 sites covering the species geographic ranges and reflecting local environmental gradients.<br>The GenTree Platform is a new resource for investigating ecological and evolutionary processes in forest trees. The coherent phenotyping and environmental characterization across 12 species in their European ranges allows for a wide range of analyses from forest ecologists, conservationists and macroecologists. In addition, the data here presented can be linked to the GenTree Dendroecological collection, the GenTree Leaf Trait collection, and the GenTree Genomic collection presented elsewhere, that together build the largest evolutionary forest ecology data collection available.