Changes in community-weighted trait mean, functional diversity, precipitation, temperature and surface area along an elevational gradient in Tenerife, Canary Islands

Data collection took place in April and May 2018. All data and samples were retrieved from permanent plots established in 2008, following the design of the standardized mountain road survey of the Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN). Three roads on the island's southern slopes were selected, spanning from the coast to the crater of Mt. Teide. On each road, twenty sampling sites were distributed evenly over the ascent of approximately 2,300 m. At each sampling site, two plots with 2 m x 50 m each were established, one directly adjacent and with the long side parallel to the road, and a second one perpendicular to the roadside plot, at 50-100 m away from the road. Steep topography and private property prevented sampling in some locations, resulting in a total of 111 plots. Temperature and precipitation data for each sampling site were obtained from CHELSA (Karger et al. 2017). Mean temperature and total precipitation of the main growing season (from March to May) were calculated for each sampling site. We divided the elevational gradient into 100 m vertical bands (which roughly corresponded to the elevational difference between our sampling sites). We used a digital elevation model of Tenerife from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/). The surface area for each band (polygon) was calculated with ArcGIS Desktop software (version 10.5, ESRI, Redlands, USA). For CWMs, NAs represent plots with no species, and for Rao's Q they correspond to plots with less than 2 species. Please refer to the ReadMe file and the related publication for more information.