Vascular plants from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse

Ruben Erik Roos1, Kristel van Zuijlen1, Johan Asplund1, Mari Steinert2

1 Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Ås, Norway; 2 Ås, Norway

Corresponding author(s): Ruben Erik Roos (ruben.erik.roos@nmbu.no)Kristel van Zuijlen (kristel.van.zuijlen@nmbu.no)Johan Asplund (johan.asplund@nmbu.no), Mari Steinert (mari.steinert@nmbu.no)

Received {date}; Revised {date}; Accepted {date}; Published {date}

Citation: Combination of authors, year of data paper publication (in parentheses), Title, Journal Name, Volume, Issue number (in parentheses), and doi of the data paper.

Resource Citation

Roos R E, van Zuijlen K, Asplund J (2017): Vascular plants from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse. Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management.

Abstract

One of the major challenges for contemporary ecologists is to understand how ecological communities respond to environmental changes. Although classifying species to their taxonomy is useful, it has major limitations when it comes to answering ecological questions. A more functional approach, based on a species set of traits that define its performance within an ecosystem, provides much more insight. Many plant ecologists have now applied such trait-based approaches, but these studies are often limited to vascular plants and do not include other important primary producer groups such as lichens and bryophytes. However, there may be clear differences in what drives changes in community level traits across environmental gradients between producer groups: in vascular plants changes in species community are often most important and intraspecific variation is often also significant, whereas recent studies suggest that in lichens intraspecific variation alone drives changes in community level traits. In this study, we will disentangle the relative importance of species turnover versus intraspecific variation as drivers of community-level traits in different primary producer groups simultaneously across the same environmental gradient in Finse, Southern Norway.  The % cover was estimated visually in 50x50cm subplots with a wire frame marking out 10x10cm squares. All species covering less than 1% was marked as cover = 0.5 in the data.

Keywords: Samplingevent, alpine plants, functional traits

Project details

Project title: FuncFinse: Primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient
Personnel: Ruben Erik Roos

Data published through GBIF: https://ipt.gbif.no/resource?r=alpine-finse

Spatial coverage

General spatial coverage: South Norway
Coordinates: 58°59'42''N and 62°40'26.4''N Latitude; 5°16'22.8''E and 12°28'48''E Longitude 

Datasets

Dataset description
Object name: Darwin Core Archive Vascular plants from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive format
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: https://ipt.gbif.no/archive.do?r=alpine-finse
Publication date of data: 2019-12-13
Language: English
Licences of use: Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License

Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 2017-02-15
Hierarchy level: Dataset