Plant Community Responses to Warming Experiments in the United States

Data from six experimental warming studies in the United States, compiled by Kara Dobson and last updated in April 2026. The dataset includes species' relative abundances per plot, year, and treatment, along with functional type classifications and thermal niche estimates derived from GBIF occurrence records. The associated analysis code is available on Zenodo.

Use Cases

• Modeling community thermophilization (heat adaptation) based on species' relative abundances and treatment data
• Analyzing shifts in plant functional types under experimental warming conditions
• Correlating species' thermal niche estimates with observed abundance changes in warming plots
• Comparing community response trajectories across six distinct geographic experiments

Strengths

• Data from six distinct warming experiments provides comparative context
• Includes derived thermal niche metrics (median, 5th, 95th percentile) for species from GBIF records
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Data is limited to six specific experimental sites in the United States

Provenance

Source

Kara Dobson via figshare

Collection Method

Experimental data from six warming studies, with species niches calculated from GBIF occurrence records within a 2000km bounding box.

Time Range

Temporal coverage of the experiments is not specified.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-14 15:02:27

Geography

Six warming experiments within the United States.