Veg-X - an exchange standard for plot-based vegetation data : Exchange standard for plot-based vegetation data

Background Sharing research data provides benefit to the general scientific community, but the benefit is less obvious for the investigator who makes his or her data available. Principal Findings We examined the citation history of 85 cancer microarray clinical trial publications with respect to the availability of their data. The 48% of trials with publicly available microarray data received 85% of the aggregate citations. Publicly available data was significantly (p = 0.006) associated with a 69% increase in citations, independently of journal impact factor, date of publication, and author country of origin using linear regression. Significance This correlation between publicly available data and increased literature impact may further motivate investigators to share their detailed research data.

Wood density is an important trait in trees indicative of their life history and mechanical and physiological strategies. The following examines the evolutionary ecology of wood density using a large database for seed plants. In particular, we focused on the geographic and phylogenetic variation in wood density for both gymnosperms and angiosperms. A phylogenetic supertree was constructed for over 4600 taxa, allowing for comprehensive analyses of divergences across the seed plant phylogeny. Community-wide means and variances for wood densities were quantified for 171 standardized forest communities. Wood density was generally highly conserved across the entire seed plant phylogeny, yet large divergences were found within the rosid clade. Geographic and community variation in wood density, however, was significantly lower in temperate and high elevation communities, dominated by gymnosperms, than in tropical lowland communities, dominated by angiosperms, suggesting an increase in trait and, to some extent, clade filtering with latitude and elevation. Together, our results support the notion that both biotic and abiotic forces have been important in the evolution of wood density as well as in controlling the observed trait mean and variance across geographic gradients.

Organizing principles are needed to link organismal, community and ecosystem attributes across spatial and temporal scales. Here we extend allometric theory-how attributes of organisms change with variation in their size-and test its predictions against worldwide data sets for forest communities by quantifying the relationships among tree size-frequency distributions, standing biomass, species number and number of individuals per unit area. As predicted, except for the highest latitudes, the number of individuals scales as the -2 power of basal stem diameter or as the -3/4 power of above-ground biomass. Also as predicted, this scaling relationship varies little with species diversity, total standing biomass, latitude and geographic sampling area. A simulation model in which individuals allocate biomass to leaf, stem and reproduction, and compete for space and light obtains features identical to those of a community. In tandem with allometric theory, our results indicate that many macroecological features of communities may emerge from a few allometric principles operating at the level of the individual.