species-comp-flam

Project goals

The main goal of this study was to determine how species combination and drought condition together influence flammability of species mixture where component species differ in their strength of LFMC-flammability relationship as well as in their LFMC at the same time.

We burned pairs of shoots collected from two common co-occurring shrub species from the semi-arid shrublands of Texas, Prosopis glandulosa and Juniperus pinchotii, which differ in both their LFMC and their LFMC–flammability relationships at any given time. We measured the flammability of shoot pairs in which the first branch’s ignition depended on an external ignition source, while the ignition of the neighboring branch depended on the heat release from the first branch, across four pairwise species combinations (Prosopis–Prosopis, Juniperus–Juniperus, Juniperus–Prosopis, and Prosopis–Juniperus) under four drought conditions: low, moderate, high, and extreme. The first three drought conditions represent the water stress they experience in a typical summer: early summer, mid-summer, and late summer. We also imposed an additional drought condition in which we burned shoot pairs at a water potential around −7 MPa to represent extreme drought.

Each data file in ./data/ has as an associated machine readable metadata file. If a data file named lfmc_wp.csv, then it has an associated metadata file as lfmc_wp_metadata.csv. The metadata file describes each variables information: name of the variables, the data type, the unit and a description how the variables measured.

All the data analyses were performed in R with all scripts in scripts/. To reproduce the results, please read run_all.R script. The task need to perform before running each script is documented at the beginning of each script.