Data for: Trees with zygomorphic flowers can persist at lower abundance in diverse communities

Zygomorphy may help the persistence (i.e., decrease extinction) of small and scattered populations, ensuring cross-pollination even when individuals have few conspecifics nearby. To test our hypothesis, we use phylogenetic regression models to relate the abundance of 478 Andean species to the zygomorphy of their petals, zygomorphy of their reproductive organs, and shape of their corollas. We used floristic and abundance data from the Madidi Project, and characterized their flowers based on online photos and species descriptions for which website links are provided. Our database of floral traits for all tree species in the Madidi includes binary categorizations (yes or no) of whether the petals are zygomorphic (corolla symmetry), whether the androecium or gynoecium are zygomorphic (reproductive organs symmetry), and whether the corolla is tubular (tubular corolla). To help isolate the effects of floral traits on species abundances, we included among our predictor variables two principal components that summarized the variation among species of six functional traits.