Investigating plant community composition and functional traits across the latitudinal extent of the western boreal forest of Canada

Related Publication:
Standen, K.M, & Baltzer, J.L. (2021). Permafrost condition determines plant community composition and community-level foliar functional traits in a boreal peatland. Ecology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.7818

These data were collected to investigate the role of permafrost thaw in shaping the structure and function of plant communities, and thus better understand carbon cycling with ongoing climate change in the boreal forest. These data include plant functional traits, community composition (plants identified to genus, and in most cases species) as stem counts for vascular species and percent cover for non-vascular species, and supporting environmental data (canopy density, organic layer thickness, active layer thickness) across 4 sites spanning the latitudinal extent of the western boreal forest. We collected plant community and environmental data at 3 sites using 20, 1 m2 quadrats placed in a random-stratified design along a belt transect of 100m by 10m. These transects were broken up into different habitats and traits were collected for common and abundant species in each of these habitats. The last site has a permanent forest dynamics plot (Scotty Creek FDP) set up in 520, 20 m by 20 m gridcells. Of these gridcells, thirty were selected for trait, community, and environmental data collection. A LI6400XT portable gas-exchange system (LI-COR Inc., Lincoln, Nebraska) was used to collect maximum photosynthetic rate, dark respiration rate, stomatal conductance, and transpiration rate. Samples used for gas exchange were collected, dried, ground using a SamplePrep 8000 ball mill grinder (SPEX SamplePrep, Metuchen, New Jersey), and analyzed for foliar N and C using a 2400 Series II CHNSO Elemental Analyzer (PerkinElmer, Waltham, Massachusetts).

These data were collected to investigate the role of permafrost thaw in shaping the structure and function of plant communities, and thus better understand carbon cycling with ongoing climate change in the boreal forest.

Standen, Katherine M.; Baltzer, Jennifer L., 2021, "Environmental and plant community composition and functional trait data across peatlands of the Forest Dynamics Plot at Scotty Creek, NT.", https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/R4FTPW

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Access, Use, and Distribution of these data, metadata, and associated materials are governed by this CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

The terms of this license are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode

https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5683/SP2/R4FTPW