Fire & fitness at Staffanson Prairie Preserve

Here is the dataset and reproducible analysis for the paper: “Fire synchronizes flowering and boosts reproduction in a widespread but declining prairie species” by Wagenius, Beck, and Kiefer in PNAS (2020).

CODE: R script echinacea_sppFireCode.R replicates the data analysis and produces Figures 2, 3, and 4 of the manuscript and figures in the supplement. The R script reads the csv file below.

DATA: The ascii comma-separated-values file echinacea_sppFireData.csv contains spatial and reproductive measures for burned and unburned mating scenes at Staffanson Prairie Preserve from 1996 to 2016.

Fields include:

unit: burn unit at Staffanson Prairie Preserve, “east” or “west”
year: year in which reproductive data, 1996-2014
burned: indicates whether unit was burned prior to the growing season, “burned” or “unburned”
flaPlas: count of flowering plants in burn unit
totalPlas: count of total living plants, flowering plants + nonflowering plants
flw: proportion of plants in flower
hdCt: average number of flower heads per flowering plant
flwDensity: flowering plants per hectare, count of flowering plants divided by unit area
nn1.hmean: harmonic mean of distance to nearest flowering neighbor, in meters
nn2.hmean: harmonic mean of distance to second nearest flowering neighbor, in meters
nn3.hmean: harmonic mean of distance to third nearest flowering neighbor, in meters
nn4.hmean: harmonic mean of distance to fourth nearest flowering neighbor, in meters
meanSdSet: average proportion of achenes which contain fertilized embryos
meanAcheneCt: average number of achenes produced per flower head, includes fertilized and unfertilized achenes
meanFecundity: average number of fertilized achenes produced per plant, product of individual seed set, achene count and head count
meanSp1: average number of days styles persist on a flower head
ms: average pairwise temporal flowering synchrony, proportion of overlapping flowering days, scene-wide
mean.sync: local synchrony, proportion of overlapping flowering days with four nearest neighbors
sdsd: standard deviation of flowering start date
mean.duration: average flowering duration, in days
lwr95.sp1: lower bound of bootstrapped 95% confidence interval for mean style persistence
upr95.sp1: upper bound of bootstrapped 95% confidence interval for mean style persistence
lwr95.sdSet: lower bound of bootstrapped 95% confidence interval for mean seed set
upr95.sdSet: upper bound of bootstrapped 95% confidence interval for mean seed set

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02 January 2020 SW

Here is the updated R script:

echinacea_sppFireCode.R

Here is the csv file:

echinacea_sppFireData.csv


16 August 2020.

Citation for the paper:

Wagenius, S., J. Beck, and G. Kiefer. 2020. Fire synchronizes flowering and boosts reproduction in a widespread but declining prairie species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1907320117

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/3000


More info (video, press release, photos):

http://www.echinaceaproject.org/fire/