Meta-analysis from articles reporting phenotypic plasticity between 1987 and 2011

We compared the phenotypic plasticity of life-history and non-life history traits in a meta-analysis that investigated 24 years of research. We first examined 583 papers that responded to the keywords “life history & morphology & plasticity” between 1991-2006 from all databases in Web of Knowledge (WoK-ISI) and between 2007-2011 from Web of Science (ISI), as well as a few studies known to us that met the criteria published between 1987 and 2011. From these, we selected the 213 studies that reported reaction norms in different trait types across environments and species. Data extraction from each paper included information from all tables, text, and figures using the software Image J. Quantification of the reaction norms was achieved through the computation of the CV of the trait expression across environments. We computed 5,885 coefficients of variation including 211 species exposed to at least two and at most 11 different environments. The readme file from this same project will help you understand the information that was collected. The data is associated with the paper: Acasuso-Rivero, C., Murren, C. J., Schlichting, C. D., & Steiner, U. K. (2019). Adaptive phenotypic plasticity for life-history and less fitness-related traits. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*, *286*(1904), 20190653. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0653