Six island systems—three with a history of vertebrate herbivores and three without—provide a novel test of contrasting ontogenetic defense trajectories. The dataset contains measurements of leaf toughness, phenolic content, and nutrient levels for ten native woody plant species per system, comparing juvenile and adult individuals. Xoaquin Moreira published this 62.8 KB dataset on figshare in April 2026 under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
Use Cases
- Modeling ontogenetic trajectories of plant defense based on leaf toughness and phenolic content measurements.
- Comparing defensive trait evolution between islands with and without a history of vertebrate herbivores.
- Analyzing correlations between leaf nutrient levels and physical or chemical defense traits across species.
- Testing hypotheses about relaxed selection on plant defenses in ecosystems where large herbivores are extinct.
Strengths
- Data is explicitly structured to test a novel hypothesis across six distinct island systems.
- Includes three specific defensive trait measurements: leaf toughness, phenolic content, and nutrient levels.
- Compares ontogenetic stages (juvenile vs. adult) for ten species per system.
- Published under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license for reuse.
Limitations
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- The 62.8 KB size indicates a relatively small, focused dataset.
Provenance
- Source
- figshare
- Collection Method
- Primary research measurements of leaf traits from selected plant species.
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-04-26 08:38:01
- Geography
- New Zealand, New Caledonia, Mauritius, Canary Islands, Azores, Californian Channel Islands