A major advance of the last 20 y at the interface of biological, environmental, and conservation sciences has been the demonstration that plant biodiversity positively influences ecosystem function. grassland, shrubland, savanna/shrubland, wetland, desert, tundra, anthropogenic (e.g., urban), primary succession (postvolcano), many habitats), and the life form(s) surveyed (forb, graminoid, bryophyte, tree, shrub, woody, all). The all category for life forms (235/346 data sets) indicated that all plants were recorded, although there was often ambiguity about inclusion of, for example, bryophytes, which might be absent entirely, or tree seedlings in forest understory plots. Mean species richness values were summed across different groups of species in the same plots (e.g., forbs and graminoids, natives and exotics) when such data were presented separately in the original papers. In cases for which the authors of a paper identified a primary driver of temporal vegetation change (262/346 data sets), we used the classification shown in Rabbit Polyclonal to RNF111 Fig. 3 (quantifies proportional change between two groups (35), which is appropriate for quantification of temporal change using the initial state as a control and the end state as a treatment (36). The raw log ratio was standardized to a common decadal time scale (35), by dividing by the time interval (and = can be related to predictor variables (covariates); and (calculated using diversity or evenness indices except for the evaluation of predictor variables, which was omitted due to small sample size. All analyses were conducted in R version 2.15.2 and OpenBUGS via the R2OpenBUGS package. Additional details are provided in FR901464 supplier SI Methods. Supplementary FR901464 supplier Material Supporting Information: Click here to view. Acknowledgments We thank J. Chase, D. Sax, and two anonymous reviewers for input on an earlier draft of the paper. M.V., I.H.M.-S., C.D.B. and R.B. were supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada. L.B. and P.D.F. were funded by the Research FoundationCFlanders. S.C.E. was FR901464 supplier supported by the National Ecological Observatory Network. S.W. was funded by the Velux Foundation. Footnotes The authors declare no conflict of interest. This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. Data deposition: Our database is provided as Dataset S1. See Commentary on page 19187. This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1312779110/-/DCSupplemental..