Co‐mast: Harmonized seed production data for woody plants across <scp>US</scp> long‐term research sites

Plants display a range of temporal patterns of inter-annual reproduction, from relatively constant seed production to "mast seeding," the synchronized and highly variable interannual seed production of plants within a population. Previous efforts have compiled global records of seed production in long-lived plants to gain insight into seed production, forest and animal population dynamics, and the effects of global change on masting. Existing datasets focus on seed production dynamics at the population scale but are limited in their ability to examine community-level mast seeding dynamics across different plant species at the continental scale. We harmonized decades of plant reproduction data for 141 woody plant species across nine Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) or long-term ecological monitoring sites from a wide range of habitats across the United States. Plant reproduction data are reported annually between 1957 and 2021 and based on either seed traps or seed and/or cone counts on individual trees. A wide range of woody plant species including trees, shrubs, and lianas are represented within sites allowing for direct community-level comparisons among species. We share code for filtering of data that enables the comparison of plot and individual tree data across sites. For each species, we compiled relevant life history attributes (e.g., seed mass, dispersal syndrome, seed longevity, sexual system) that may serve as important predictors of mast seeding in future analyses. To aid in phylogenetically informed analyses, we also share a phylogeny and phylogenetic distance matrix for all species in the dataset. These data can be used to investigate continent-scale ecological properties of seed production, including individual and population variability, synchrony within and across species, and how these properties of seed production vary in relation to plant species traits and environmental conditions. In addition, these data can be used to assess how annual variability in seed production is associated with climate conditions and how that varies across populations, species, and regions. The dataset is released under a CC0 1.0 Universal public domain license.

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Publication Details

Journal
Ecology
Published
2024-12-12
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4463
Primary Topic
Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Co‐mast: Harmonized seed production data for woody plants across US long‐term research sites

E. Penelope Holland, Katherine M. Nigro, David M. Bell, Diana Macias et al.
Ecology
Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies
article

Co‐mast: Harmonized seed production data for woody plants across US long‐term research sites

E. Penelope Holland, Katherine M. Nigro, David M. Bell, Diana Macias, Jalene M. LaMontagne, Tom E. X. Miller, Natalie L. Cleavitt, Jill F. Johnstone, V. Bala Chaudhary, David F. Greene, Stacy A. McNulty, Mark Winterstein, Elizabeth E. Crone, Rebecca S. Snell, Jessica H. Barton, Roman Zlotin, Miranda D. Redmond, Ian S. Pearse, Robert Parmenter, Mark Schulze, Walter D. Koenig, Nicholas J. Lyon, Jess K. Zimmerman, Angel Chen, Johannes M. H. Knops
article en

Abstract

Plants display a range of temporal patterns of inter-annual reproduction, from relatively constant seed production to "mast seeding," the synchronized and highly variable interannual seed production of plants within a population. Previous efforts have compiled global records of seed production in long-lived plants to gain insight into seed production, forest and animal population dynamics, and the effects of global change on masting. Existing datasets focus on seed production dynamics at the population scale but are limited in their ability to examine community-level mast seeding dynamics across different plant species at the continental scale. We harmonized decades of plant reproduction data for 141 woody plant species across nine Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) or long-term ecological monitoring sites from a wide range of habitats across the United States. Plant reproduction data are reported annually between 1957 and 2021 and based on either seed traps or seed and/or cone counts on individual trees. A wide range of woody plant species including trees, shrubs, and lianas are represented within sites allowing for direct community-level comparisons among species. We share code for filtering of data that enables the comparison of plot and individual tree data across sites. For each species, we compiled relevant life history attributes (e.g., seed mass, dispersal syndrome, seed longevity, sexual system) that may serve as important predictors of mast seeding in future analyses. To aid in phylogenetically informed analyses, we also share a phylogeny and phylogenetic distance matrix for all species in the dataset. These data can be used to investigate continent-scale ecological properties of seed production, including individual and population variability, synchrony within and across species, and how these properties of seed production vary in relation to plant species traits and environmental conditions. In addition, these data can be used to assess how annual variability in seed production is associated with climate conditions and how that varies across populations, species, and regions. The dataset is released under a CC0 1.0 Universal public domain license.

EcologyVol. 106(1)
Dartmouth College (US), United States Geological Survey (US), State University of New York (US), University of Alaska Fairbanks (US), University of California, Santa Barbara (US), University of New Mexico (US), Cal Poly Humboldt (US), University of Puerto Rico System (PR), Cornell University (US), University of Missouri–St. Louis (US), Whitney Museum of American Art (US), Missouri Botanical Garden (US), University of California Hastings College of the Law (US), National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (US), Ohio University (US), Indiana University Bloomington (US), Pacific Northwest Research Station (US), Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (US), Fort Collins Science Center, University of York (GB), Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (CN), Rice University (US), University of California, Davis (US), SUNY Adirondack (US), Colorado State University (US), University of California, Berkeley (US)
National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station
Openalex Percentile: Top 77%
Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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