Deer grazing drove an assemblage-level evolution of plant dwarfism in an insular system

Plant dwarfism, a syndrome characterised by a significant reduction in plant height and organ size, is a widely observed pattern of stress-tolerant life-form evolution that results from local adaptation to harsh environmental conditions. The drivers of assemblage-level dwarfism have primarily been attributed to abiotic factors, such as low temperature, aridity, poor soil fertility, or frequent fires. While biotic factors such as grazing pressure from herbivores can contribute to the establishment of plant dwarfism, these factors have rarely been tested at assemblage levels. Focusing on a dwarf plant assemblage comprising over 80 taxa on a small continental island in Japan with a high deer density, we hypothesised that historical deer grazing could also be a factor contributing to the large-scale convergent evolution of dwarfism. To test this hypothesis, we measured the size of 1,908 individual plants of 40 taxa-pairs, comprising both palatable and unpalatable pairs from the island and t..., , , # Deer grazing drove an assemblage-level evolution of plant dwarfism in an insular system

Raw morphological data, leaf N concentration, and input file for LM analysis and genetic analyses are included. We also show the BioProject ID of raw read data of MIG-seq analysis deposited in NCBI.

## Description of the Data and file structure

### Morphodata\_All\_20240326.csv

##### Raw morphological data

* Taxapair: Name of the taxa pair
* Yakushima_alpine_or_counterpart: Binary population code (1: Yakushima alpine taxa, 0: counterpart taxa)
* Lat: latitude
* Lon: Longitude
* Alt: Altitude (m)
* Taxon name: Scientific name of taxon
* SpecimenSheetNO: Specimen sheet number or voucher number
* Locality: Name of collection sites
* IndividualID: Plant individual ID in the sheet
* Leafsize: Measured length of leaf (mm)
* Plantheight: Measured length of plant height (mm)
* IndexTrait: Used traits for statistical analyses of leaf size or plant height
* Preference: deer pre...