Dataset of drought tolerance ecophysiological traits (vulnerability, resistance and mortality risk) measured in 5 experimental plantations on 21 European forest tree species from 4 biomes.

The ecophysiological data of drought vulnerability, drought resistance and mortality risk presented in this dataset are individual field measurement carried out on 21 different tree species across 5 experimental forest plantations encompassing a gradient of European biomes i.e, from a Mediteranean forest in Sardinia, an Oceanic forest in the Landes region of France to 3 types of continental forests in Belgium, Germany and Austria. The dataset contains experimental measurements of eco-physiological traits collected over an extensive field campaign conducted from September 2021 to August 2022. These five experimental forests are 7 to 14 years old and are all part of the large tree diversity network -TreeDivNet- (https://treedivnet.ugent.be/). The aim of these experimental forests is to study "true diversity" effects (i.e, allowing separating between diversity and identity effect) on forest functioning. This dataset contain four files : 1) "experimental_dataset.xls" = the dataset itself; 2) "data_dictionary.xls" = the data dictionary explaining the different variables presented in the dataset; 3) "experimental_sites.xls" = a description table containing a summary of each experimental site characteristics; and 4) "readme.txt" = a full description of the dataset and files. As an exemple, we used this dataset to assessed drought tolerance (xylem vulnerability to cavitation), water stress (water potential) and a metric of drought-mortality risk (hydraulic safety margin) during the extreme 2021 and 2022 summer droughts. The results of this study are published in Global Change Biology, Decarsin et al., 2024 (under revision).