Data from: Price equations for understanding the response of ecosystem function to community change

Biodiversity-ecosystem function research in natural ecosystems would benefit from new theoretical and analytical tools that match common characteristics of observational community data. To this end, we developed a novel, abundance-based version of the ecological Price equation in both discrete and continuous forms. As part of the presentation of this new method, we conducted two demonstration analyses.

The first analysis focuses on pollination of watermelon by wild bees. We net-collected wild pollinator specimens from standard areas of flowering watermelon crop at 16 replicated farms in 2012. We also measured how many pollen grains each bee species deposited per visit. These per-visit pollen deposition rates were estimated as a genus-level property, as is common for landscape pollination studies. To determine total pollination for each bee species at each site, we multiplied pollinator visitation rates and per-visit pollen deposition. The attached data includes site by species matrices for the abundance (watermelon_com.csv) and per-capita pollen deposition (watermelon_fun.csv) of bee species.

The second analysis focuses on changes in total community biomass of stream invertebrates collected from 25 sites along a strong, continuous pollution gradient. These data were previously published by Pomeranz et al. (2019), accessible at the Dryad link given below. Specimens were individually measured and assigned to one of six functional groups. Finer taxonomic resolution is available in the original study, but we use functional groups here to get enough data to effectively model. The attached data includes site by functional group matrices for the abundance (stream_inverts.csv) and per-capita biomass (stream_invert_size.csv) of stream invertebrate functional groups, and a third .csv which describes the level of pollution at each site (steam_data.csv).

The code is a single R code file which produces the results and figures found in the manuscript. We have also included a README and several .csv files (those described above) that need to be read in.

These data may be useful for other analyses of variation in ecosystem function across sites. We stress that the stream invertebrate data were collected by Pomeranz et al. (2019) and they should be cited for any use those data. The relevant link to access their data is: https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.v6g985s