Data and R code for Tansley review New Phytologist 2021: "An integrated framework of plant form and function: The belowground perspective"

The files in this archive are related to the paper of Weigelt, Mommer, Andraczek et al. (2021) An integrated framework of plant form and function: The belowground perspective. Tansley Review New Phytologist. The paper developed and tested a new conceptual framework of plant form and function linking above and belowground traits of 2510 species. We found that an integrated, whole-plant trait space required as much as four axes. The two main axes represented the fast-slow ‘conservation’ gradient on which leaf and fine-root traits were well aligned, and the ‘collaboration’ gradient in roots. The two additional axes were separate, orthogonal plant size axes for height and rooting depth.

This archives contains four files:

1. Weigelt et al.2021RCode.DataCleaning.txt -  RCode for the complete data processing starting with the downloaded database files from the Plant Trait Database version 5.0 (TRY, Kattge et al. 2020), the Global Root Trait database (GRooT, Guerrero-Ramirez et al. 2020) and a small number of additional data files listed in Table S2 of the original paper. Additional information was later incorporated using FungalRoot Database (Soudzilovkaia et al. 2020), nodDB Database (Tedersoo et al. 2018) and a compiled dataset on rooting depth (Fan et al. 2017). The code processes, cleans and merges the data and produces a final table for PCA analysis of species specific mean traits. This final table is provided as a second file in this archive (Weigelt_et_al_2021_Main.PCA.Matrix.xlsx). A second part of the RCode.DataCleaning extracts species-specific individual trait data where root and shoot traits were measured on the same plant individual or plot. This data was compiled from 43 studies identified in Table S2  of the original publication. The final table for individual trait data is the third file in this archive (Weigelt_et_al_2021_Individual.PCA.Matrix.xlsx).
2. Weigelt_et_al_2021_Main.PCA.Matrix.xlsx – Datafile with species-specific global mean trait data for 17 traits of 2510 species with at least one root and one shoot trait available. Meta-data is provided in the data file.
3. Weigelt_et_al_2021_Individual.PCA.Matrix.xlsx – Datafile with species-specific trait data where root and shoot traits were measured on the same individual or plot for 6 traits of 455 species. Meta-data is provided in the data file.
4. Weigelt et al.2021RCode.Analysis.txt – RCode for all analyses and figures provided in the paper for both the species mean and individual based dataset. The Code is annotated to help reproducibility of the analysis.