Traits of riparian woody plants responding to hydrological and hydraulic conditions: a northern Swedish database

• Articles in SCI Journals
• Sep, 2016

Summary:

The main goal of this study is to create a database that ultimately serves further studies on riparian vegetation and flow response guilds in the boreal region and on transferability of results across different regions. For this aim we compiled traits for all woody riparian species in northern Sweden that, directly or indirectly, underlie their responses to hydrological and hydraulic conditions, between October 2012 and April 2015. Consulted sources of information were diverse, ranging from scientific to informative and whose accuracy might or might not be verified. They were focused on particular or several traits and species from concrete areas to a worldwide perspective. Sources were characterized by different degrees of accessibility and showed a wide variety of descriptions, categorical and ordinal classifications, and numerical information for each trait. Our effort was to synthesize information for each trait from all sources into the common frame of our own database, following own defined criteria so that comparisons between species are congruent. Therefore, this data set is unique in that it comprehensively combines and homogenizes morphological, phenological, reproductive and ecological data for 59 woody, riparian, boreal species and from 118 sources of information, that would otherwise be scattered and hardly available.

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.1533/full