Temporal variation and its drivers in the elemental traits of four boreal plant species

Code, data, and results for Richmond et al. Temporal variation and its drivers in the elemental traits of four boreal plant species. Manuscript accepted at the Journal of Plant Ecology.

code - This folder contains all the R scripts necessary to reproduce our analyses.

• 1 - WeatherCor.R tests correlations between Lethbridge and Clarenville weather station data obtained from Environment and Climate Change Canada so that 2016 data can be supplemented.
• 2 - GDD.R takes raw weather data, calculates GDD as per McMaster & Wilhelm (method 1) using 5 deg. Celsius as a base temperature as per Brown et al. 2019. Then, GDD is extracted for each sampling date during our study.
• 3 - NDMI.R processes Landsat imagery to obtain NDMI values at each of our sampling points in 2016 and 2017.
• 4 - EVI.R processes Landsat imagery to obtain EVI values at each of our sampling points in 2017 (2016 EVI values were provided by coauthor Travis Heckford, but were obtained using the same method).
• 5 - StandardizedPercentModels.R builds and analyzes our elemental composition models (% C, N, P) for our four study species.
• 6 - RatioModels.R builds and analyzes our stoichiometric ratio models (C:N,C:P, N:P) for our four study species.
• 7 - VariationPartitioning.R partitions the variance between site, year, and species for each element and ratio that we tested.
• 8 - ManuscriptFigures.R produces figures for the manuscript.

graphics - This folder contains all the graphics and figures produced during the analysis.

input - This folder and all folders within contain the raw data used in analysis.

output - This folder contains all the output from our analysis