Humans impact biodiversity by altering land use and introducing nonnative species. Yet the extent to which coexistence processes, such as competition and niche shifts, mediate these relationships is not clear. This dataset was used in a study that aims to compare how human development influences wetland plant diversity by examining patterns of species richness, niche specialization, and nonnative species occurrences along a human development gradient.

This dataset can be used to analyzed species richness and niche specialization (a measure of the range of human development extents over which a species occurs) patterns from species occurrence data across 1582 wetlands in Alberta, Canada. Associations between human development extent and species richness, niche specialization, and nonnative species can be tested using linear mixed models. Also, nonmetric multidimensional scaling ordination can be applied from raw data (see usage notes) to examine whether community composition differed among wetlands surrounded by different human development extents.

Note that human development data are accessible only through a data sharing agreement with ABMI. See the readme document for more details on how to obtain assess to these data.

Results of these analyses can be found in the corresponding publication: Inverse responses of species richness and niche specialization to human development, Journal of Biogeography. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.14240

Protocols for wetland and terrestrial sites can be found here:

Wetland: https://www.abmi.ca/home/publications/501-550/548 (accessed 07/19/2021)

Terrestrial: https://www.abmi.ca/home/publications/501-550/549 (accessed 07/19/2021)

This dataset provides the variables used for the analyses of the corresponding study. These variables are derivative products from the raw dataset of ABMI found here: https://www.abmi.ca/home/data-analytics/da-top/da-product-overview/Species-Habitat-Data.html. This dataset allows to replicate the analyses of the study. However, note that some data are accessible only through a data sharing agreement with ABMI. See the readme document for more details on how to obtain assess to these data.

• Latitude: Latitude of the sites (corresponding to ABMI grid, exact locations are unknown)
• Longitude: Longitude of the sites (corresponding to ABMI grid, exact locations are unknown)
• Protocol: Sites sampled under the Terrestrial or the Wetland protocol (see below)
• Site: ABMI unique ID for each site
• Year: Year of sampling
• Richness_observed: Calculated vascular plant richness (see below for access to raw data)
• Richness_Chao: Calculated Chao richness (see paper methods and below for access to raw data)
• Total_disturbance_percent: Total human disturbance in 250m buffers around each site calculated from human footprint ABMI data. Data are accessible only through a data agreement with ABMI (see below).
• Community_mean_niche_specialization: Calculated mean niche specialization for each vascular plant community. See paper methods for more details on the calculation of niche specialization index for each species.
• Proportion_exotic: calculated proportion of exotic species in each vascular plant community. See paper methods for more description on datasets used to define exotic species status.