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This repository contains a series of .csv files developed for the study titled "Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities", authored by: Perez-Navarro MA, Lloret F, Molina-Venegas R, Alcántara JM and Verdú M. The author of these files is Perez-Navarro MA. These files are used to characterize species niches, estimate climatic disequilibrium for recruit communities growing under plant canopies and open spaces, and conduct statistical analyses. Variables description of each table is compiled in the METADATA.txt file. Please visit Github readme () to correctly place these files in the folder tree and check for the corresponding scripts where they are required. Please notice that although alternative approaches were calibrated to estimate species niche (accordingly producing multiple niche, distances and disequilibrium dataframes), only niche centroid calibrated discarding 95 percentile of lowest niche density was used for paper results and figures. Also, in case of univariate analyses only bio01, bio06 and bio12 were used in analyses, though species niche and further niche and community estimations were obtained for all 19 variables. This is version 2 (v2) and include extra intermediate .csv required to run all the R scripts included in the abovementioned Github repository. NAs or empty cells present in the .csv files of this repository means no data and do not contribute to the analyses. Visit METADATA.txt file for variables description. These data are under CC0 license. It is possible to share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose. Studies using R scripts or any data files from these study should cite the abovementioned paper (Perez-Navarro MA, Lloret F, Molina-Venegas R, Alcantara JM, Verdu M. (2024). Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities). Please contact m.angeles582@gmail.com in case of having doubts or problems with the existing files and scripts. Current rates of climate change are exceeding the capacity of many plant species to track climate, thus leading communities to be in disequilibrium with climatic conditions. Plant canopies can contribute to this disequilibrium by buffering macro-climatic conditions and sheltering poorly adapted species to the oncoming climate, particularly in their recruitment stages. Here we analyze differences in climatic disequilibrium between understory and open ground woody plant recruits in 28 localities, covering more than 100,000 m2, across an elevation range embedding temperature and aridity gradients in the southern Iberian Peninsula. This study demonstrates higher climatic disequilibrium under canopies compared with open ground, supporting that plant canopies would affect future community climatic lags by allowing the recruitment of less arid-adapted species in warm and dry conditions, but also it endorse that canopies could favor warm-adapted species in extremely cold environments as mountain tops, thus pre-adapting communities living in these habitats to climate change.

AbstractCurrent rates of climate change are exceeding the capacity of many plant species to track climate, thus leading communities to be in disequilibrium with climatic conditions. Plant canopies can contribute to this disequilibrium by buffering macro‐climatic conditions and sheltering poorly adapted species to the oncoming climate, particularly in their recruitment stages. Here we analyse differences in climatic disequilibrium between understorey and open ground woody plant recruits in 28 localities, covering more than 100,000 m2, across an elevation range embedding temperature and aridity gradients in the southern Iberian Peninsula. This study demonstrates higher climatic disequilibrium under canopies compared with open ground, supporting that plant canopies would affect future community climatic lags by allowing the recruitment of less arid‐adapted species in warm and dry conditions, but also it endorse that canopies could favour warm‐adapted species in extremely cold environments as mountain tops, thus pre‐adapting communities living in these habitats to climate change.

High rates of climate change are currently exceeding many plant species' capacity to keep up with climate, leading to mismatches between climatic conditions and climatic preferences of the species present in a community. This disequilibrium between climate and community composition could diminish, however, when critical climate thresholds are exceeded, due to population declines or losses among the more mismatched species. Here, we assessed the effect of an extreme drought event on rich semiarid shrubland communities in the south‐eastern Iberian Peninsula. Using a community climate framework, we compared the community climatic disequilibrium before and after the drought episode on three study sites with different levels of precipitation. Disequilibrium was estimated as the difference between observed reference climate and community‐inferred climate, calculated as the mean climatic optimum for the species present, weighted by their abundances. We found that extreme drought embedded within a decadal trend of increasing aridity led to a significant reduction in community climatic disequilibrium, and that this reduction was positively related to water deficit (low P/PET values). In contrast, microhabitat variables such as vegetation cover or slope, did not emerge as significant predictors of changes in community climatic disequilibrium. Our study highlights that extreme drought events pushing communities in the same direction as climate trends may decrease community climatic mismatch, leading to communities more adapted to aridity through loss of drought‐sensitive species. These findings underscore that extreme events will play a crucial role in speeding up climate‐induced community transformations and biodiversity losses.

Current rates of climate change are exceeding the capacity of many plant species to track climate, thus leading communities to be in disequilibrium with climatic conditions. Plant canopies can contribute to this disequilibrium by buffering macro-climatic conditions and sheltering poorly adapted species to the oncoming climate, particularly in their recruitment stages. Here we analyze differences in climatic disequilibrium between understory and open ground woody plant recruits in 28 localities, covering more than 100,000 m2, across an elevation range embedding temperature and aridity gradients in the southern Iberian Peninsula. This study demonstrates higher climatic disequilibrium under canopies compared with open ground, supporting that plant canopies would affect future community climatic lags by allowing the recruitment of less arid-adapted species in warm and dry conditions, but also it endorse that canopies could favor warm-adapted species in extremely cold environments as mountain tops, thus pre-adapting communities living in these habitats to climate change.

Location in the climatic niche over several years of plant comunities from a field manipulation experiment of climate change carried on in Garraf (Spain). 1. Description of methods used for collection-generation of data: Field data: vegetation surveys based on transects within experimental plots Species distribution data: species occurrences along their geographical distributions were obtained from the database of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF 2019, ) Climate data: climatic variables were obtained for the period 1979-2013 at 1-km2 resolution from CHELSA v.1.2 database Karger et al. (2018) DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2017.122; Karger et al., (2017) DOI: 10.16904/envidat.228.v2.1 See details in DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.14233 2. Methods for processing the data: A principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to reduce the dimensionality of the 13 climatic variables to the first two PCA axes. The species occurrences from the geographic space were translated into the two-dimensional climatic space defined by the two PCA axes. A two-dimensional kernel density function was applied to the species occurrences in the climatic space. The centroid of each species niche was obtained as the center of gravity of the niche. The observed climate at the study site for the average of the experimental period 1999-2014 and for each year were translated into the two-dimensional climatic space. The Euclidean distance in the climatic space between community location (based on species centroid averaged weighed by species's abundance) and the location of the observed climate in the respective years was calculated.