Contemporary phenotypic change in plant quantitative traits

This is a new version of the Gorné & Díaz 2017 database (doi:10.5281/zenodo.580095). We cheked the categorization of each case, fixed of some mistakes. Also, we disambiguated the trait type moderator and add a new (mean based) measure of change. This database included studies that provide data of changes in quantitative traits of angiosperms within a known temporal framework (<300 years). The search was performed by Scopus (www.scopus.com), up to 22 December 2015 (search strings in Gorné and Díaz 2017). The database includes studies that measured intraspecific change in a quantitative trait and which report the elapsed time when the phenotypic change occurred. The studies recorded a single population before and after a change in the environment or compared two (or more) populations by measuring a quantitative trait across two situations, where one of them was a new condition of known age. Both, by measuring change directly in the field or by performing common condition experiments (e.g. common garden experiments or reciprocal transplants). Studies reporting results from artificial selection or interspecific hybridization were excluded. The environmental changes included expansions of distributional range, soil or air pollution, exposure to herbicides, changes in salinity, pH, climate, disturbance or irrigation regime, and addition or loss of species in the local community. All data available in each study were recorded, including several observations of the same species. These procedures resulted in a database containing 1716 observations from 128 studies, with changes in populations of 152 species from 34 families, in elapsed times of < 260 years, and covering a wide range of traits, lifespan, growth forms and environmental situations. All data points were categorized according to biological properties of the study system (lifespan, growth form, trait type) and methodological ones. The amount and rate of phenotypic change is expresed as the standardized mean difference Hedges g (Hedges 1981, 1982), a rate of change which is the Hedges g over the elapsed time in years, and the log-transformation of both of them. The standardized mean difference is equal to the haldane numerator, which is a standard rate of evolution (Haldane 1949; Gingerich 1993). In addition, we upgraded the Díaz and Gorné (2017) database, computing the response ratio effect size (logRR) (Hedges et al. 1999) whenever possible. The response ratio is a mean-scaled metric equal to the darwins numerator (Haldane 1949). So that we compute a rate of change similar to darwins (time expressed as years instead of million years). contact email address: [email protected]